The Rohans — Music
Two hex digits can do more than a whole automation lane. Here's what those little codes sitting next to every note actually do.
In a timeline DAW, anything that changes over time, a filter sweep, a volume fade, gets its own automation lane drawn with a mouse. A tracker skips the lane entirely. Every row in a phrase can carry a note plus up to two commands, and each command is four hex characters: two for a target or speed, two for a value.
That's the whole vocabulary. No separate window, no curve to draw, just a short code sitting right next to the note it affects.
Take FCUT 1080. FCUT adjusts filter cutoff. The first pair,
10, is speed: how fast the change happens. The second pair,
80, is the destination: where the cutoff ends up. Set speed to
00 on most commands and the change happens instantly instead of
ramping.
Once that pattern clicks, most of the command list stops looking like alphabet soup. Nearly everything in the reference table follows the same speed-plus-destination shape.
Ramps volume toward a target instead of snapping to it. Set an instrument's base volume to silent and use VOLM to swell it in, which is most of what makes a pad or texture layer feel alive instead of switched on.
FLTR sets cutoff and resonance directly. FCUT moves the cutoff at a chosen speed. Use FLTR when you want a filter setting right now, FCUT when you want it to sweep there over the next few rows.
Cycles between up to four relative pitches on a fixed, fast clock. One command turns a single held note into a chord-like flicker, no extra notes or channels needed.
Restarts the sample repeatedly within the row at a set interval. This is the stutter and roll effect you hear in a lot of breakbeat and glitch material, done with one command instead of chopping the sample by hand.
Pushes a note back by a number of ticks instead of letting it land exactly on the row. This is how swing and loose, human-feeling timing get built into a pattern that would otherwise be locked to a rigid grid.
Changes the tempo mid-song, in hex. Useful for a breakdown that needs to slow down or a build that needs to speed up without splitting the track into separate sections.
A few commands behave in ways that aren't obvious from the name alone.
HOP is instant: any instrument or command sharing that row still
fires before the jump happens. LPOF can't trigger a note by
itself, a sample has to already be playing for it to do anything.
LEGA and PTCH both slide pitch, but LEGA is
exponential and PTCH is linear, which matters more than it sounds like it
should once you're matching a slide to a specific interval.
None of this is exotic once you've hit it once. It's just the kind of thing that reads clearly in the manual and confuses everyone the first time they see it in a real pattern.
Traqueur has 22 phrase commands in total, covering pitch, filters, MIDI, and playback offset. The complete table, with every value spelled out, lives in the manual. For a worked example that chains several of these together, see how to make lofi music in a tracker. And if you're still working out how a tracker's grid compares to a normal DAW's timeline, start with what is a tracker DAW.
What is a tracker DAW? · How to make lofi music in a tracker · Trackers and the demoscene