The tracker space is weird and full of twisty passages... Sampling was a common starting point for the basic sounds. The cool thing about tracker files is that they would include all the pcm samples, so people would build up their library of sounds largely by getting them from other people's files... A few would create their own samples by recording things out in meatspace, or do delightfully weird stuff like drawing waveforms.

From there, a given tracker would have all kinds of shenanigans available for manipulating the audio, in addition to whatever one wanted to do in an external audio program with a full effects stack.

Once you noodle around with synthesizers a bit, everything looks like either an oscillator or a transform... and who cares what the oscillator is.

Interesting reading that because the trackers I used didn’t support sampling. If I recall correctly, they were just tone generators. So you had to define waveforms like you might for a VSTi in a modern (by comparison) sequencer. Albeit without the fancy UI of a VSTi, any piano roles, nor the drag-and-drop placement of bars of music.

It was kind of like writing music in hexadecimal.

I wasn’t particularly good at it though. I much preferred the workflow of a sequencer to a tracker.