Introduction - Lesson 1 - Lesson 2 - Lesson 3 - Lesson 4 - Lesson 5 - Credits
sYnCHAoZ' Skale Tracker Drumming Tutorial
Lesson 1 - The basics

Starting Skale Tracker

First things first we need to learn how to load and organize our instruments into Skale Tracker. In the upper right part of the Skale Tracker interface you will see your instrument banks. Each line is one instrument bank, capable of holding either a Skale Tracker instrument (.ski file), a Fast Tracker II instrument (.xi file) or a Wave sample (.wav file). You will notice that you can only view 8 instrument banks at any given time, however pressing the "A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H" buttons will switch to a new instrument cluster of 8 additional instrument banks respectively. Furthermore you can switch the entire instrument container by pressing the "Swap Bank 00-7F/80-FF" button, which will give you an additional 8x8 instrument banks, adding up to a total of 128 independant instrument banks each capable of holding 1 instrument or sample of infinite size and quality.
KNOWLEDGE: Skale has an advanced feature that allows for multi-instruments, which are instruments capable of holding 16 different other instruments within, filling only 1 instrument bank, thus technically allowing for a total ammount of samples: 16x8x16 totalling to an astounding 2048 samples. Creating and managing such multi-instruments will however not be covered in this tutorial.
You should now have a basic understanding of how the instrument banks work, so now we will load our tutorial instruments. Follow each step closely.
1. Click the "Disk Options" button in the General Options menu.
2. On the far left side in the "Items to load" menu, highlight the "Instrument" button (a small 'bulb' lights up when you have selected it correctly).
NOTE: Since we have already defined our default instrument folder and extracted the tutorial drum package files into that directory, you should already see the 8 instrument files in the browser window.
3. Highlight the first instrument bank 01 in our instrument cluster on the right side, and then click the file named "tKick.ski". You have now loaded the kickdrum sample, and the name should be displayed in instrument bank 01 as "tut Kickdrum".
4. Next we will do the same procedure for the remaning 7 instruments, assigning them to each their own instrument bank. Highlight instrument bank 02 and click the file "tSnare.ski", loading the Tut Snaredrum into bank 02. Proceed with loading all of the other instruments into the remaining 6 empty banks in the following order:
Bank 03: Tut Crash Cymbal L (tCrashL.ski)
Bank 04: Tut Hihat Open (tHihaO.ski)
Bank 05: Tut Crash Cymbal R (tCrashR.ski)
Bank 06: Tut Ride Cymbal (tRidecym.ski)
Bank 07: Tut Splash Cymbal (tSplash.ski)
Bank 08: Tut Hihat Closed (tHihatC.ski)
When finished, your instrument cluster should look like this.
WARNING: If you highlight an instrument bank and load a sample, and then afterwards load a different sample into the same bank, the previous instrument will be overwritten without notice!
HINT: You should always load instruments in the respective usage priority. If you know that you will be using the kickdrum and snaredrum very often throughout your song, you should load them in banks right next to each other in the same cluster. This makes it easier and faster to select them for usage.
Congratulations, you have now mastered loading instruments into the instrument banks. End of Lesson 1. Continue to Lesson 2.

Onwards to Lesson 2
Introduction - Lesson 1 - Lesson 2 - Lesson 3 - Lesson 4 - Lesson 5 - Credits