I felt so myself before I turned the machine on. The possibilities are numerous: arp, ratchet, glide, reverse, random everything, micro-tune, chance, midi-chord, midi CC changes and many more.Īll of this may sound overwhelming and quite a bothersome approach to music-making. Each FX slot holds instructions about what you want the note and instrument to do, in addition to just trigger. I think of them as a mix of midi effects and a mod matrix. Yes, they can hold values for the built in reverb and delay sends, but they have a much more powerful and necessary application. I must clarify what the FX1 and FX2 slots represent. I actually found myself composing in a more thoughtful manner. When using my setup of 4 pieces of external gear, employing numerous built-in samples, the wavetable and granular synthesizer engines, I did not find this limiting. There is a catch though… each track is mono, meaning that each step generally chokes the previous step. Multiply that by 8 and you get way more than 8 traditional tracks. One track could accommodate 128 individual samples or if you are a victim of gear acquisition syndrome, 128 individual external pieces of gear (only 16 midi channels though). What this means, practically, is that I could have each step on one track triggering a different sample or sending midi notes to external synths. Each one of those steps can contain completely different values in their perspective column slots. Each track has 4 columns, representing note, instrument, FX1 and FX2, in which you input a series of numbers and letters, or codes. The Polyend Tracker has 8 tracks, however, do not let the low track count fool you. As an MPC One owner myself, I must say that the quickness and efficiency of this little boutique wonder is amazing and couldn’t be more approachable to creativity compared to the MPC if it tried. Taking their cues from trackers of lore and adding in waveform and granular synth capabilities, along with competent sampling, the Polyend Tracker has managed to come up with a sleek little black box which rivals the likes of big-guns Akai and Native Instruments. Youtube is full of artists lauding the workflow and accessibility of trackers and boutique companies have been answering the call to fill this niche.Įnter Polyend-riding off their success with the Polyseq and Medusa, Polish boutique brand Polyend jumped into constructing a hardware tracker: the Polyend Tracker. Although it had never gone away, there has been a resurgence of tracker-based approaches to electronic music in recent years. It answered the question of how to construct music within the constraints of the computers at the time and opened up the door of composition to the wider public. I am not going to delve into the history of tracker software in the music industry, but since the 80s era of Ataris and Amigas, it has been used in a slew of video games and developed and employed by artists like Karsten Obarsky, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Nasenbluten and others. Ha! Another self-contained DAW in a box, based on weird music tech from the worst decade in human history? No reading manuals, no confusion, no wishing the workflow was similar to something else… just making music with a spreadsheet. I hooked everything up via midi, switched it on, and the next thing I knew hours had passed getting lost in making music. I wanted my sequencer to do more than just sequence, so the Polyend came home with me. The two are worlds apart, with the Korg strictly sticking to sequencing (only 4 tracks!?) and the Polyend being a self-contained music production box. After an extensive search, I had only two choices: Korg SQ-64 and Polyend Tracker. Global chip shortages and high demand have rendered finding an available hardware sequencer almost impossible. Although I had a creeping curiosity about trackers-I’ve tried Renoise and found it refreshing-the Polyend Tracker was pressed upon me due to market forces.
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