Abstract The waveform-reconstruction schemes of order tracking (OT) such as the Gabor and the Vold–Kalman filtering (VKF) techniques can extract specific order and/or spectral components in addition to characterizing the processed signal in rpm-frequency domain. The study first improves the Gabor OT (GOT) technique to handle the order-crossing problem, and then objectively compares the features of the improved GOT scheme and the angular-displacement VKF OT technique. It is numerically observed the improved method performs less accurately than the VKF_OT scheme at the crossing occurrences, but without end effect in the reconstructed waveform. As OT is not exact science, it may well be that the decrease in computation time can justify the reduced accuracy. The characterisation and discrimination of riding noise with crossing orders emitted by an electrical scooter are conducted as an example of the application.