Polyend Tracker - Samples are the best synths?
I don't talk enough about samples or samplers, so in today's newsletter I am going to talk about the Polyend Tracker
NOTE: I started writing this month’s ago and then it never departed my drafts folder. The Tracker is still a favourite in the studio and it will feature on the newsletter/podcast more in 2024. I am also considering getting it’s sibling the Polyend Play in a couple of months time.
Setting yourself a framework from within which to work and be creative, can sometimes be a very powerful thing. It’s worth trying if you are exploring sound design and music composition. Give it a go. Plan what you wish to do each week, call it complete at the end of the week and set an overarching goal for the month.
So in my case that will be the next ModCaf event I am going to. They tend to show off their work there and it was very interesting in October when I went along. However sometimes just creating something for yourself can be a wonderfully cathartic experience to have.
This post is based on what I got up to last week and I’ve just started to sketch out what I might like to explore this current week. Repeat next week and so on.
Here’s a journal, hopefully there is some stuff in this you’ll find useful?
Day 1
My home studio is growing month by month and I’m having a lot of fun doing so but since I was close to exhausting my budget (a very vague one at that), I decided to buy one more thing, what don’t I have as a hardware device - A sampler.
I decided to buy the Polyend Tracker more for it’s main workflow, I love trackers more than I do piano roll DAW software and they’ve seen a resurgence recently. The Polyend Tracker being probably the first of it’s kind.
There are a lot of great sample libraries out there and I want to profile these in each newsletter going forward, as a section in which I challenge myself to come up with something of my own using the Tracker, maybe just short ideas that I can post here, to help inspire yourselves, as it can be overwhelming the first moment you open up a new sample pack with a vast choice of snare drums, which do you go for? What sounds right in your own track? Quite often it comes down to pitch, key if melodic sounds, tempo if talking about drum loops, do you want to beat slice them?
Why did I say samples are the best synths? The Polyend has no synth functionality of it’s own, which is fine because you can load it up with some samples and then engineer those sounds through a variety of techniques to create your own sounds and textures. You can render/resample patterns to make new samples out of these constructed ideas. This is a simplistic explanation but we can delve deeper into this for those who may be interested.
In the meantime, here is a little WIP based on the factory sounds that came with the Polyend. I love my bass line and the random filtered synth on track 4 but the synth on track 3, I’m not sure about plus may shorten the patterns a bit. All part of the discovery process :-)
Day 2
The next day I created another fresh project and quickly realised how easy it is to just tweak, throw notes at this machine and come up with some quick ideas. Crafting them further will no doubt be equally swift to complete tracks with. Going to be fun.
Day 3
Whilst in the end I was able to connect the Tracker to my Syntakt, it was a bit problematic and this article on the Polyend site helped me. TRS trouble connecting with my Syntakt and then realised there are two types of connector
I do want to connect it with my modular rack but will get stuck
Thankfully Solmare from Polyend messaged me to let me know about Retrokits so will add this to my shopping list and need to find a better way of storing path leads and MIDI connectors rather than in a box randomly. Anyone know of good solutions for this?
so I’m going to save this for another week
In other news
Oxi have just upgraded the Coral with MPE support, turning it into a fully polyphonic 8-voice MPE synth. So any MPE controller can be connected for very expressive performances indeed. Their video demonstrates the new capabilities and walks you through how to set it up.
This is really exciting and since I don’t own a MPE controller yet, I’ll put one on my shopping list for certain!
Oxi are soon releasing an update for their step sequencer and publishing the first detailed tutorial for it’s complex matriceal mode soon.
The Spanish company are clearly very busy at the moment!
Charting progress on other platforms
Soundcloud has always been a favourite of mine for a number of reasons, it’s great for sharing your work, discovering others but I love the way you can build up playlists there. For example I plan to use this to group together my familiarisation process with the gear that I own, using it as a journal, an audio blog. It’s cool for that. I often dive into peoples’ “behind the track” notes and I use that to talk about the decisions made on sound design, sample selection and so on.
Sometimes I’m not convinced Substack is the right place for this blog, I struggle with the term newsletter, I don’t know why that is, maybe it’s because I’ve been blogging on and off for years.