When I set out to create this site, I had to review a lot of ancient content in order to reconstruct my own history. A large part of that was about 60 songs I made with different trackers in the period 1990-1997.
And it turns out that 1997 was my most productive year: I composed 19 songs.
To my surprise, I didn't dislike what I heard that much. Of course, there were things I definitely would have done differently today. Others I wouldn't have done at all. But something interesting about doing this type of revisionism is that sometimes you rediscover techniques and styles that you had forgotten. Sometimes I also remember what I had in my head when composing those songs, and I compare it with what ended up coming out with the resources I had at that time. In several cases I found good ideas that were poorly executed, and I felt sorry for that being lost.
Therefore, I decided to make a selection of what I liked most from that year with the intention of producing it again taking advantage of the equipment and knowledge I have today. I wondered if I should re-record the original tracks, but it seemed like a better idea to keep the original material as it was. Exactly the same tracks with the same samples that those XM files used. The idea is not to remake those songs completely but to try to give it the sound that I would have wanted to achieve at that time.
More specifically, it would mean extracting the tracks from the original tracks using OpenMPT, importing and cleaning them in Studio One, removing what doesn't work, mixing everything again and finally mastering.
That selection ended up including 8 songs. I will reveal the list as I progress with the project, but I can tell you that the first one is "Re-evolution" and it is already finished.
I am going to cover the production of each of them including audio previews in different posts here.