I made this shortly after getting my polyend tracker and have been sitting on it basically since audio posts were released. it is very good that the polyend tracker can sample from the actual radio airwaves

1. "Onde Magnétique OM-1 Jam", Flo Chai

There's a couple boutique instruments made in recent years that let you "play a cassette tape like a piano", by spinning the tape motor at a speed determined by the "piano key's" pitch (and only when the key is held down).

This musician uses two(!) of these devices, double-fisted, plus some guitar pedals to make some atmospheric fluttery music anchored by bit glitching and a quiet, metronome-like drum machine beat.

2. "level up", DISKQ

DISKQ's videos revolve around making complex tracks with grooveboxes and minimal sets of hardware. Here she deploys a noisy Erica Synths drum machine with the "PO-20 Arcade", which is the Pocket Operator that is most fun to play with but hardest to make anything other than sound effects with. Playing the LXR-02 faders like an instrument and DJing the Arcade's filter settings, she engineers a startling degree of chiptuney structure.

3. "breakcore/glitch patch in plug data", Artiom Constantinov

"Plug Data" is a distribution of PureData with (thank goodness, finally) more legible graphics. Here Artiom uses it to visualize a self-playing patch: lush FM swells, drill&bass kicks and, that's right ladies and genderqueers, a guest appearance by Ms. Hatsune Miku herself. (Or some formant synth anyway.) Apparently you can download the .pd file for this track from the musician's patreon.

4. "HLT - A Lost Transmission (AE MODULAR DEMO)", Huxleys Last Trip

AE Modular is a semi-obscure alternative to the popular "eurorack" format; it's designed to be cheaper and smaller, and uses plain jumper wires instead of TS cables.

I really like rhythmic hissy noises. I'm not sure that's a common viewpoint, so I don't know how to describe that this is an exceptionally beautiful example of rhythmic hissy noises. Emotionally intense ambient.

5. "Polyend Tracker : First Test & Jam", ultrasyd

Ultrasyd was a beloved chiptune composer best known for work on the Atari STe. He died in October of 2020, reportedly of a heart attack. This was his final posted piece of music, 11 days previous. In it he's using a new setup with a standalone tracker and its wavetable engine. The piece, a playful "Complextro" jam, bursts with promise and in the YouTube post he sounds excited about what he'd do next.

⬇️ Click below for a primal noise burst and also Plaid ⬇️

If I was just a little bit more ambitious then I might delve into the world of becoming a synth YouTuber. Instead I'm going to post some thoughts here.

Some context,

• This is not meant to be a product review, hence the title
• I bought the Polyend Tracker for cheap some six months ago and have used it pretty regularly since then
• I'm pretty noob at synths and music generally
• I like tracker-like workflows generally and I use Renoise a bit but the UI conventions frustrate me

In my experience one of the most underrated features of the Polyend Tracker is the ability to use it as a MIDI controller that is programmed with a tracker style workflow and provides Polyend's fantastic fill functions. I often hook the Polyend Tracker up to an external synth over TRS MIDI (or use the included adapter for 5-pin MIDI, which I typically do) and start plucking away at the touch pads for some novel sounds.

If I like what I hear, I can live record it into the tracker grid (optionally quantized.) Alternatively, I can use fill functions to generate random notes along a given scale (lots of options) and tweak the pattern length to taste (up to 128 steps.) Either way, the pattern is easy to edit afterward in the tracker workflow.

Something I enjoy doing is hooking the Tracker up to a 303 clone, generating a random 32 step pattern, letting that loop so I can preview changes, delete some notes, add slides, add accents, tweak the pattern length, and even adjust individual notes until I'm happy with what I have. I can easily save that to a project file and look up exactly what the sequence was later.

The Polyend Play (which I have not used, yet) can also generate patterns and use that to control a MIDI instrument, and it does not have a tracker workflow which may be a benefit depending on how you feel about trackers. Because the Polyend Tracker is a sampler (the Play isn't), I can also play the MIDI instrument using the programmed pattern and record it back into the Tracker as a sample (yes, it can play MIDI tracks and record at the same time.) If I want to compose an entire song that way, I can record 4 bars of a bass track (for example) and use that as a sample in my project, and then use the same process to layer other parts from the same synth if I want, or combine it with drum samples, etc.

As powerful as this is, there are some important limitations to note. First, the Polyend Tracker is not a streaming sampler, so while there is a huge amount of SD card memory, you only have a tiny 8 MB of sample memory to use in a single project, which is something like a little over 2 minutes of mono samples. For most projects that is plenty but personally I like to pair it with something like a Nanobox Tangerine (or the Black Box, which I don't have) or a DAW if I want to layer Polyend Tracker compositions with long-running parts.

Another limitation that you might have picked up on above is that the Tracker is a mono sampler, so if you're generating awesome stereo sounds out of your MIDI instrument, you lose that when sampling back into the Tracker. To be clear on that point, you can pan tracks and instruments on the Tracker for stereo output, but the samples themselves are always mono. Obviously this isn't a problem if you're only using Tracker as a MIDI controller and recording your instrument on something else.

And it's important to note that the Tracker only has a single USB port, which is USB-C, which it uses for power. So in order to use Tracker as a MIDI controller over USB, it needs to be connected to something that can also power it. Depending on your setup this can be a major hassle, and I've mostly avoided those situations so I don't know what problems you might run into when trying to run the Tracker through, say, a USB hub.

The Polyend Tracker is also pretty limited compared to PC software trackers like Renoise. You only get 8 tracks which is typically plenty (especially if you're only using the Tracker as a MIDI controller and not combining that with being a groovebox at the same time) but feels tiny if you've used other trackers.

You can also apply effects per-step, but there are only two effects slots for this, so if you want to combine lots of things like reverb and delay send, panning, velocity, micro-move, etc. then you'll need to apply some of those at the instrument settings level and not the per-step level. That is a restriction that comes up a lot when I'm composing with samples on the Tracker, but as a MIDI controller typically the only effects I use are micro-timing and velocity since the other stuff doesn't apply to MIDI instruments anyway.

A workflow trick that's worth noting here is that when you're holding the Instrument button on the Tracker, the very last touch pad selects the instrument before the MIDI instrument entries, so by tapping that and using the jog wheel to scroll down, you can get to MIDI 1 etc. very quickly.

Overall, the Polyend Tracker is a very novel and powerful MIDI controller. Because of its tracker-like workflow and the ease of setting it up, I often get very different sounding sequences out of my synths than I get using their on-board sequencers (when they have them) or using a keyboard. And because it's also a sampler, I can have a lot of fun generating short sequences and layering them without needing to bring additional gear into the setup.