Nectarine

This track was originally composed for my "Explorer" CD, but I decided to drop this version because of some recent upgrades I've made to my studio. Compared to the other tracks on the CD, this would sound a bit out of place which is why I've opted to re-write it (version 4.0!) using better quality sounds.

I wasn't going to bother releasing this, but then I decided that it would be a shame to scrap it after all the work I put into it. Besides, there are a few things that are a little bit interesting in this version, so I have released it as a free download.

Firstly, there is an 'homage' to John Williams somewhat hidden in the track. (I don't mean the overall sound of the introduction, which is also very strongly influenced by JW) The only hint I will give is that it starts at about 7:02 into the track. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what it is. ;)

Secondly, this is pretty much the last track that I composed entirely (not including post-processing) in FastTracker II! It was written on a 200MHz Cyrix PC with 64MB of RAM. I no longer have a good DOS machine to work on, so I switched to Modplug Tracker once this track was complete.

The track was composed in two parts, the symphonic introduction and the dance/techno section. Both of these XM files were composed using FT2, and once they were complete I exported each instrument group to WAV files using ModPlug Tracker on a different machine. The wav files were mixed and some additional effects (mostly reverb) were added in Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit).

I've decided to release it as an MP3, because of all the post-processing I did in Audition (which makes the mix 'shine' a bit more) and because the MP3 is smaller than the XM files, which I believe added up to over 20MB.

So this is also a farewell to FT2. Special thanks go to the guys in Triton for the many glorious years of XM tracking and I wish to dedicate this little tune to them for their hard work and for what they gave to the tracker scene.

(Though you never know, with emulators like DosBox out there I just might play around with FT2 again someday...)

Most (if not all) of the samples were downloaded from the FastTracker Instrument Archive (kiarchive).