I did that for years, too :) On the Amiga, that's all I did music wise, rip modules (I still miss that) and listen to / look at them, first in trackers and then with EaglePlayer and DeliTracker and their visualizations. Then on the PC, I made painfully short stubs, like 10-30 seconds, for a long time, with FastTracker (painful because I just didn't know how to make them longer, they were little rhythmic or melodic figures I guess). Then I got into Renoise, and I guess for the most part sampled and looped things I liked, and added speech samples to that. If I count from the first moment I fell in love with Protracker at age 11 or so, and me making something I would call a song in my 20s, it took me over a decade to even begin sucking at music, before that it wasn't even music. And I feel I owe so much to the Amiga, and the people who made music for it, and cared about playing back music for it.
I remember listening to Axel F, and attempting to make my own mods, but basically just changed the instrument samples.