In this paper, adaptive controllers are designed to track a given trajectory for linear and nonlinear systems. No condition on the tracked trajectory, other than continuity and boundedness, is needed to simultaneously ensure exponential convergence to the tracking reference, exponential convergence to the identification of the plant, and robustness to nonparametric uncertainties. To achieve this, the formulation of the excitation condition associated with the identification part of the adaptive scheme is proposed without employing closed -loop signals, allowing the use of a transient enrichment of the reference. The effect of this transient modification is attenuated by using relaxed requirements for the identification, obtained through a generalization of several estimation algorithms found in recent literature that use memory mechanisms. Consequently, no spectral content of the tracked trajectory ---a classic requirement in adaptive theory ---is needed to guarantee the mentioned features when the proposed scheme is used. A numerical example is given to illustrate the design aspects involved and the distinctive features of the proposed strategy.