Thirteen themes, and the machines behind them

Tracker music was made on machines you remember in colour. A blue desktop with an orange pointer. A DOS screen full of double lines. A deep blue picture inside a light blue border. The sound and the look belong together, so Modulo comes with thirteen themes that bring the look back.

The players in this post are drawn by this website, in each theme’s real colours and style, straight from the same design file the app uses. Screenshots from the app itself will follow.

More than a colour scheme

A theme changes the whole app at once: the player, the pattern, the library, the panels and the settings. And it goes further than colour. Every theme is light or dark, and sets its own corners, frames, bevels, title bars, type and background pattern, after the machine or program it calls to mind. Square windows and a pixel font in one, rounded buttons and a grooved lid in another.

Two things never change:

• Everything stays readable. Every text in every theme passes the WCAG AA contrast check, and the app’s build refuses a theme that misses a single ratio.
• The pattern keeps its meaning. Instruments walk the colours in the same order in every theme, and effects keep the colour of what they do. Where the original machine had fewer colours, the colours repeat; Dot Matrix and One Bit draw the pattern in one ink, as the originals did.

Free: Modulo and Modulo Light

These two come from no machine: they are Modulo’s own house style. Modulo is the house look and the default: ink black with lime. Modulo Light is the same look for daylight, on warm paper with white cards and blue instead of lime, because lime on paper is hard to read. Both are free, and stay free.

The eleven with Modulo Plus

Desktops

Inspired by Workbench 1.3 on the Commodore Amiga, Topaz is the classic 16-bit desktop: deep blue, white title bars, orange, square corners everywhere and the pixel font for every word, the pattern too. Inspired by Workbench 2 and 3.1 on the same Amiga, Gadget is that desktop a few years later: grey, crisp raised buttons with a light and a dark edge, blue title bars. Inspired by the original Apple Macintosh, One Bit goes back to the one-bit desktop of the eighties: black on white, pinstriped title bars, a dithered desk and an outlined default button with a second ring around it.

Home computers and a DOS tracker

Inspired by the Commodore 64, Breadbin puts the player inside the wide light blue border of the breadbin home computer, deep blue inside, with that machine’s own colours for the instruments and faint scanlines over the screen. Inspired by the ZX Spectrum, Attribute Clash is the rubber-keyed 8-bit from Britain: black, blue paper for the title bars and the brightest ink it had. Inspired by DOS trackers such as Scream Tracker and Impulse Tracker, CP437 is a tracker in DOS text mode: blue boxes in double cyan lines, a black pattern and the bright text-mode colours. It is the closest thing to the programs most of this music was made in.

Consoles

Inspired by the Super Nintendo, Mode Seven is the 16-bit console as it was sold in the States: light grey, the grooved lid as lines in the title bars, a round purple play button. Inspired by the Super Famicom and the European Super Nintendo, Diamond Pad is the same console in Europe and Japan, with its four face buttons: red to play, yellow and green for previous and next, blue for what you select, and the four of them as a diamond in the headers. Inspired by the Nintendo Famicom, Kazoku is the Japanese 8-bit family console: cream, burgundy and gold, and its own palette for the instruments.

A handheld and a sleeve

Inspired by the original Nintendo Game Boy, Dot Matrix is the brick handheld’s screen: four shades of pea green from edge to edge, a dark green bezel and the LCD grid over the pattern. Inspired by the VHS tapes of the nineties, VHS is a video cassette sleeve from that time: cream, heavy condensed black type, labels in boxes with a red dotted rule, and the five-colour stripe band running across the top.

Try one on first

You find them in Settings › Theme, each one as a live mini player with its name and what inspired it. Modulo and Modulo Light switch the moment you tap them.

Without Modulo Plus, a tap on any of the other eleven tries it on: the whole app wears it for as long as you stay on the Theme page, and a bar at the bottom tells you so. Leave the page and Modulo is back in its own colours; nothing is kept. Buy Modulo Plus while you are trying one on and that theme stays.

Modulo Plus is a one-time purchase, no subscription, and it also brings EQ / DSP and export. Even the cover on your lock screen follows the theme you pick.