Yaaay. I've made my second song now (Poppy)

Yes, 82 instruments are waay to many. Almost embarrasing.

I would say that I could have made this song with about 50 instruments in the list.
15 of them would be the bass
10 of them bass with kick drum
15 effects
10 leads

You see, the bass is of Type 3 with a HW sawtooth but I could not make it sound as I wanted when I used Period 0 (Auto) so I made one instrument called Bass C with a fixed period of 35. Then I created Bass D with another period for the note D etc. All in all I think I use 15 different bass notes resulting in 15 different instruments. So instead of changing a bass note in Arkos I actually change Instrument.

And since I needed a kick drum played at the same time as the bass note I had to create about 10 similar bass instruments but with a kick on top.

Then we have the instrument placed in the middle channel. The one playing a slow arpeggio. Sometimes that had to be combined with a closed hihat. Sometimes with an open. Sometimes with a snare and on one occation that channel plays a tone, snare, hihat and kick at the same time! (Sounds like shit if I play it single but it works inside the mix)

The up-swish and long cymbal crash are two different instruments too. I haven't figured out how to change the noise frequency with an effect command yet. Actually it's three instruments if you also count the one place where I needed a crash at the same time as the main melody was played.

Then we have the effects. Sure, I could probably have created several of them using pattern effects but I chose to add them to the instruments instead. One advantage of this is that when I change an effect in the instrument editor, it changes everywhere in the song at the same time instead of me having to locate all places where the pattern effect needs to be changed.

I guess it's a matter of choice. Can't say one way is always better than the other.

But if I had cared about memory usage I would probably have created the song a different way, using lots more pattern effects rather than creating a copy of an existing sound with juuuuust a little different attack, decay, echo or vibrato. I often intentionally build my songs with more and more complex instruments the longer the song plays so even though the lead at the beginning might SOUND the same as in the end, subtle things have changed on the way.

So, that's my thoughts. Remember though I'm still a newbie. This is only my second song for the AY and I have never worked with Arkos Tracker before this so for me it's still an exploration to find out HOW to use Arkos the best way (for me)

Amazing!!!

Very nice music.
I can imagine it with a platform game with a exotic theme. A bit like Wonder Boy.