To those of you yelling at me for spreading pseudoscience in my CuriosityStream segment, I was being sarcastic and showcasing how bad some Netflix "documentaries" are and why I'm partnering with a platform with higher standards for educational credibility. Apparently my delivery was too dry. Sarcasm has its perils. 🤦♂️
You're obviously deeply invested in the quack - that's cool! You're not hurting anyone, so roll how you want to roll. But given your deep investment, I'm not going to waste time arguing with you about his pseudoscience any more than I'm going to argue with the nice people at the Catholic Worker House about transubstantiation.
@William Braddell I'm not going to go back and forth on this as these types of debates have no end, so I'll just respond to your initial post. Sorry for that in advance, I only have so much time for internet debating lol. :) I've been deeply invested in things like this for a while now, mostly studying and researching for a future project on existentialism and what makes up reality. I've run into Dean Radin's world a few times (oddly when digging into Aether/Ether theories), and my impression him as someone with a strict scientific commitment but open mind to playing devil's advocate is: He's very, very passionate about his ideas and research. So passionate that he's willing to undermine scientific rigor in exchange for cherry picking results that he wanted and side-stepping placebo effects so he can continue deeper down his path rather than testing and retesting his original concepts. This lack of peer review makes more interesting ideas and material, but removes credibility and requires faith from the reader. This is generally fine and harmless, albeit a little obnoxious as his method of dealing with the criticism he invited with his lack of scientific rigor is to overwhelm the critic with cherry picked, out of context white papers, most of which he himself authored. Science can't exist in an echo chamber. It has to be selfless. You have a hypothesis, and then you dedicate the rest of your time on that project to disproving your own hypothesis. Then you invite others to do the same. This is how we know what we know about the world around us, and this is how we make meaningful progress. Unfortunately if that process is being sidestepped, whether it be for money or out of passion or just plain impatience, then the ideas remain fictitious thought-experiments. I won't say Dean Radin is a quack, because (from the bit I've seen) he does seem legitimately passionate in his own isolated studies. When I think of "quack" I think more of someone who is intentionally misleading people to make money. But I do think he has no scientific credibility, and I think he's probably comfortable with that at this point. Interesting? Sure. But for my coverage he's too easily refuted. That refute is a brick wall that prevents the skeptic from caring. A whole lot of people were skeptical about relativity, but instead of attacking skeptics, Einstein encouraged them to test it. Now we're having this conversation on technology that was literally built on it. Science gonna science brah. :)
As a long time Renoise user it's really exciting to not only see a product like this but one that's got some genuine buzz and interest from an audience that doesn't normally go for trackers. This is a super engaging demo of how powerful they can be. Nice job.
Same here, its always nice to see trackers getting a bit of attention. For me I tried every daw under the sun before discovering renoise and finding it just clicked better than any other daw (tho I do wish they would add native synthesis, I know theres VST's but they rarely work as well or fit in as nicely as the native devices)
@@bigbodgethis is exactly how i felt... daws are great, but getting a tracker is what made electronic music "click" for me. so much easier and the workflow is just extremely satisfying
Completely switched from my Akai mpc x and other sort of stand alone daw type instruments to the polyend plus a couple days ago. I’ve already made more music and had more fun than I’ve had trying to load and figure out the millions of packs and fx on many other instruments. This is going to remain in my collection forever, can’t wait to see what they come up with to add onto it. Everything they do is absolutely amazing.
Trackers are the easiest music tools I have ever used. I first played with that on the Amiga and composed dozens of tracks. It was so easy ! Then migrated to the PC and FT2. Since then, my dream has always been to see a hardware using the same Amiga tracker but with a mix of analogue and digital sounds. This one is almost there... Not missing a lot to be the perfect hardware tracker.
The loved my Amiga. I lived in San Francisco in the 80's and witnessed the parallel rise of the first Apple computers battling with primitive PCs and Commodore. I remember it being a badge of honor for programmers to fit their amazingly feature laden programs on one floppy. For a few years it looked like the Amiga was going to win.
If this thing has midi out, theres a good chance the holes in its capabilities can be filled by just hooking up some gear that can do it. For me what would have made it perfect would be some cv/gate outs to fit it into the modular setup. That would be *amazing*. Maybe for their next version they might consider something like that.
Trackers and Modules are still amazing. Made my first musical steps with Modplug Tracker for windows. Unfortunately not on a Commodore Amiga with Pro Tracker... never had one but that would have been awesome. And hey, did you know the games "Unreal" and "Unreal Tournament" were the last commercial videogames that used this module format for it's ingame Music? Not only did it help to keep the filesize small but it also allowed better and easier use of dynamic scores and sequence loops. And there was no lossy compression either. Module music format (no matter if MOD, IT, XM or S3M) are super flexible and still very useful today.
I liked the history of trackers! I'm a bit younger but old enough to remember the old days of the internet. I'm a DAW guy who has started learning trackers for video game music. Most popular ones right now are Famitracker, Deflemask, LSDJ. I tell people that trackers are like a more "programmerly" approach to music. I can input basic notes, but if anybody has tips for more advanced stuff like effects, arpeggios, grooves, voice switching fluently, etc I've been trying to learn from demo files...
this thing looks perfect for my use case. i unintentionally first learned music sequencing with VSTs and such on renoise; i have always found its display mode super elegant and intuitive once you break past the funky appearance. a physical groovebox built to be as intuitive a controller as possible for this is basically a dream.
wow! that song in a background you made with tracker... last time I heard it like 15 or more years ago and it was one of my favs at the time when i started partying and dj! what a flashback! man, thanks for this one! 🙏🤜🤛
I really like this little thing. Very cool indeed. Brings back memories of Soundtracker, NoiseTracker, and MED, though obviously a lot more powerful. I'm pretty tempted to get one. I do have one peeve, which isn't the end of the world, but an irritant nonetheless: 3.5mm jack MIDI connectors. Whilst I appreciate the fact that they're more compact, and easier to plug in, for quite some time there were two competing wiring standards, and I can never remember which one won. The point is you end up having to deal with a pile of these little 3.5mm to DIN dongles for both standards depending on what gear you have, which I don't love. Yes, the DIN connector is bulky and a bit fiddly to deal with when you're trying to plug one in and can't see the socket properly, but it at least there's only one standard to worry about. Anyway, moaning over: great video - thank you!
Hi, I just discovered your channel and I'm thrilled to have witnessed you described what were the demo scene and trackers with so much passion, accuracy and simplicity. You emphasized what was the core of the demo scene true nature, trying to do defeat the computing power limitations with pure optimizations, tricks and hacks to produce the art that was beyond what was even thinkable by anyone at that time. I'm 41 years old and I love you for that shared moment. Peace!
The first music I ever made on a computer was with Sound Tracker on the Amiga. When Fasttracker came along (DOS program) it was pretty mind blowingly powerful. aboslutely no good reason for sharing that information.
Really, as a c64 composer in the early nineties I'd like the whole concept - melancholia maybe, but after your preview, especially the grainer-section and and the hopefully expected change in the slicer-section I guess I exchange all my gear for the Medusa and the tracker. Love it
I agree that price is really good. Def gonna get it P.S:You look like flashbulb... *sees bandcamp link* oh. So i just gonna say that you're still one of the best for me along with AFX and Venetian Snares and others. Your generation inspired my generation to make interesting music
reading the description, happy to have you on the tracker bandwagon. I love arranging percussion with trackers especially. ok, time to actually, like, watch
I brought a Polyend Tracker, and instantly went "Ohhwhathaveidone..." but ohhh I love it to bits, i have a portable power bank, speaker UDG hard case and can take it anywhere I go. I cant play a keyboard for toffee, so this is perfect for helping me along.
My first tracker was OctaMed, on the Amiga 1000. Then I used ScreamTracker 3, then FastTracker 2, then Impulse Tracker 2.14 on the PC. Then I moved to a proper DAW and never looked back. I still have all of my MOD/MED/S3M/XM/IT files!
lmao, love the humor dude. I started with trackers back in the day, that was how I discovered computers were starting to become capable for actually creating music, I'm kinda itching to try one of these, I'm not sure if it's because I'd use it, or just a sense of nostalgia, but thanks for the video.
I am listening to your music on Spotify and am surprized of the classic quality (piano and violin). The atmospherics (ambient) are quite pleasing also.
Ah takes me back to my Tracker days. Listening to Aphex Twin while getting frustrated with my very old and very slow PC. Awesome vid! Preordered mine already. 😎
I would really love to see your approach on a deluge. You always take things in a really interesting direction which I would never go....I would like to see that.
Man. You and a few peoples' videos got me SO HYPED on this Polyend Tracker. I started researching it with absolutely no intention to want to buy one. It was just by chance because I saw a giveaway and then son Jonwayne producing hip hop on this. Long story short, something about this just seems so WEIRD but makes a LOT of sense. Thanks for the videos, man. Very inspiring.
Wow, trackers are really cool! I love thinking about how differences in the presentation of workflow can affect the music that's made. I also really appreciate you taking the time to learn the workflow before showing this to us, you make it look like it's so easy and fun to use!
Love it! Great job, and I like the blabber in the beginning. It was funny. Somehow you highlighted all of the things I’ve been wondering about this thing. Can’t wait till they ship out!
Speaking of the Demo scene, I recently picked up an FPGA platform called Mister, which has the best C64/SID implementation I’ve heard, outside of the real thing. Listening to all the classic demos has been more enjoyable than using Mister for its primary intention, retro gaming. It’s incredible what 80s musicians were able to accomplish, even before trackers were a thing and they had to program their tracks in machine language. Helps you appreciate just how easy we have it today with modern music tech!
Oh wow... 90s solo cup-design shirt, awesome technology, great presentation - and that tasty, tasty jungle-track .. Benn Jordan is simply a treasure! Love ya, man :)
Nice presentation Benn and Gear, will pick one up when this dark corona cloud clears up. I hope the development for the software side of this will remain active as there is plenty room for improvement afaics. A good idea machine for sure.
Man... The way you handle it makes it look so light. I've been trying to find a good portable device for making beats and this looks like what I've been wanting despite the older style of sequencer. I have an OP-1 and it's great but hard for travel as there aren't project files and 6 minutes of tape can fill up pretty quick. I have an OP-Z and it's also fun and small and easy to carry but the sampler leaves much to be desired plus pairing with a phone kills the battery quick. I've had a Deluge which has tons of possibilities, it's a little big but not too bad. But you can't export tracks or stems to mix in a DAW and the built in effects leave much to be desired. I had an MPC Live but it felt too much like a DAW in a box and the workflow was clumsy compared to Maschine or Ableton (with Push 2). And it was too big to truly be considered portable. And I have a Digitakt but the lack of synth engines and small amount of internal storage limits it. I don't mind the mono samples or 8 tracks (and the Polyend Mimicks this) but the Digitakt is also just a little heavy and chunky for portability. Also a smallish octave range. But this has expandable storage, two sample based synth engines, a small footprint and apparently weight, and a lot of interesting sequencing effects. Plus it just powers on with USB C? Yeah this looks like my dream. I think I'm gonna have to sell my Digitakt for this.
I made music with Fast Tracker II and Modplug Tracker before i switched to FL Studio and i am really excited about this. Just finding out about it cause of your video . Never saw anything about it or heard anything about it.
Great review Benn! I hope Polyend will also support the Tracker's OS with different track lengths per pattern, for crazy polymeter beats. Also it would be nice if they would allocate a bit more ram per project. Been writing music in trackers since 1992 🙂
iLL OgicK Yup. Loved the Rm1x and it was one of the first things I thought of when watching the workflow of this box. The big screen on this unit would give this a big advantage over the Rm1x, depending on how intuitive this is to use.
@@kelseydaniels7283 that and sampling capabilities, which I Know they made into the newer silver "RM1X" the name escapes me ATM think it was something 9? Anyway yes, it has my interest peaked...
Been using trackers since 1989. You missed the best thing about them, insert and delete SHIFT all the notes after the cursor position. This is amazing for quickly experiementing with different timings and is the key reason I still love trackers over piano roll (not that they couldn't add a note cursor/insert functions, they just haven't). Also how the effects are PER NOTE and WHILE the note is playing. Very hard to do that at all on piano roll sequencers (which is why drumnbass producers love trackers) Here's a few suggestions for them. 1) Add an "Octamed" style echo. It physically places notes in empty note slots. It has the awesome side effect of no echo notes playing while the main notes play, which would take a heap of messing about with sidechaining to do normally. 2) Allow export per instrument as well (yes including notes getting cut off from another instruments playing in the same track). This would bring it much closer to current work flows in post. 3) Does the keyboard have a mode for traditional row based keyboard with white keys on 1, black on 2, white +1 octave on 3, black +1 octave on 4th row? 4) Why limit it to 8 tracks?
Ordered my Polyend Tracker today. I tried Renoise and love it. It's just fun. But I prefer to stay away from my computer as I already stand in front of it all day. Hopefully it's good!
Just purchased one on Reverb. Seems like an awesome piece of gear, but but based most of the stuffed I heard people play on it, it seems like mainly for people who wanna mimic Aphex Twin / Squarepusher. Still excited to play with it.
This is a fantastic demo Benn! Best one I’ve seen yet & I’ve been drinking these all up like so many glasses of dry sherry. You paint a very clear picture of what the Tracker is capable of & it’s driving me crazy that thing isn’t on the market yet; would be a perfect off-hour wait state time killer/user for this exact moment in history.
Firstly, thank you for the history lesson. I had a totally skewed idea of what a tracker was, thinking it was all about numerical input and nerdy lists. I am not an IDM artist and I do not have attention deficiency or obsessive compulsive tendencies rather I am butterfly's minded and untidy. Startlingly, what you show me here is a musical instrument with strikingly powerful capabilities which I would have completely overlooked were it not for the work you have done on the Polyend Play.
In 2024, I spent 30 minutes watching this man create the music to a new level in the Xmen Sega game I thought I had left in the 90s. It's been over 30 years. I will never forgive you, Benathan.
I wish there was a halfway between Polyend Tracker and the NerdSeq. The CV interfaces on the NerdSeq (and some of the software choices there) are awesome. I'm just loving the additional buttons/interface on the Polyend Tracker too! But the ER-301 + Nerdseq is a complex and cool option too!
thanks, you really helped to demonstrate the essence of this thing and trackers in general :-) So excited, finally a portable hardware tracker sampler! The simplicity and power of this is bang on - Go Polyend!
Great video! I'm glad you got a sponsor for the channel. About the tracker, it's unfortunate some quirks feel so weird to have been left out, e.g. virtual channels (aka keeping the current sound on a channel playing with its envelope if you play a new sound on the same channel) is something that was solved years ago, and with so few channels available it seems to be a (workable) pain. I hope it's something that can be shoehorned in before the release, if the processing power is sufficient. I'm happy you're getting your fun and I'm glad it's great if you're new to trackers, but as a current tracker user it kinda feels like a step back in some ways.
2:20 Loved how you chose Dead Lock in the screenshot of FT. Phenomenal song... I think Elwood was around 15 or 16 when he did that which still astounds me to this day.
That rap vocal granular thing sounds like venetian snares' fool the detector. I like the way it sounds and this brings insight on how it might have been done.
If you are interested in the "tracker" method of creating music, have never tried it, but would like to get your feet wet before purchasing this hardware (when it is released), one of the best, *FREE* software music trackers is Psycle Modular Music Creation Studio. (Google "psycle" for the web sight and download) The last update was 2017 that I'm aware of, for Windows 10 compatibility, and there is little activity in the forums these days, but this is still a very powerful and versatile tracker style music studio. Up to 64 tracks or 64 voices, an infinite number of pattern "pages" with page sequencing commands. The same thing applies as in this machine in that a single track can trigger a note from any instrument or sample in your library - in other words, you don't assign any one instrument, wave or sample, or oscillator to a given track. The library of VST plugins comes fairly packed with editable and "preset" instruments including several types of sample players, a MIDI "font" player, a wealth of effects plugins, an external MIDI interface with the ability to record live from the external source or from the computer keyboard. The recording ability includes instrument control "tweaks" with a robust code control over timing and other general interface controls. It's fairly intuitive to be able to produce satisfying results from the very start. I have created full symphony pieces with it using sample libraries found around the internet, to improvisational jazz using the recording feature, to full blown "techno", looped pieces sounding similar to modular synthesis. It uses VST standard program interfacing so you can even create your own VSTs (instruments / oscillators) using some of the various VST creation labs available (like SynthMaker).
This seems like it’d make Trackers far more tolerable for me to have such a well-designed hardware controller like this. I’ve messed around with Sunvox and Deflemask on iPad, which are probably far more suited to a desktop environment, with proper qwerty keyboard mappings. Polyend tracker is definitely reasonably priced. Tempting!
Trackers where my way into music on anything that wasnt a guitar in the 90s. Digitracker on a 486 scrapped together from parts and a Gravis Ultrasound card, and holy shit did we push that fucker to the edge. In our shitful sharehouse studio featuring a 4 track tape recorder, a casio organ, a bunch of guitar amps and digitracker we where creating our own demented take on trip-hop and I swear to god we where making what the kids now call "Trap" beats back in the mid 90s, and we didnt really know what to call it, but we'd funble together backyard gigs with these contraptions and everyone would turn up and seem to enjoy it. Retrospectively it was pretty spazzy but at the time it was great. We tried to do drum and bass stuff too, but our stuff was trash so we gave up and went with what we know. Ah I miss those days. Get off my lawn.
I watched a diff video on the tracker and thought it looked cheap and unimpressive. Now I watch you use it and it looks like something that would keep me hooked for hrs! Its like a synth that uses your samples as the wave form
Just got this in the mail. I’m a drummer by trade so this is whole new territory, but I’m stoked. I also got a Roland tr-6s and Arturia minibrute so shit is about to get weirrrd
To those of you yelling at me for spreading pseudoscience in my CuriosityStream segment, I was being sarcastic and showcasing how bad some Netflix "documentaries" are and why I'm partnering with a platform with higher standards for educational credibility. Apparently my delivery was too dry. Sarcasm has its perils. 🤦♂️
Gr8 background and demo...always interesting
Dean Radin is a quack, bro.
You're obviously deeply invested in the quack - that's cool! You're not hurting anyone, so roll how you want to roll.
But given your deep investment, I'm not going to waste time arguing with you about his pseudoscience any more than I'm going to argue with the nice people at the Catholic Worker House about transubstantiation.
@William Braddell I'm not going to go back and forth on this as these types of debates have no end, so I'll just respond to your initial post. Sorry for that in advance, I only have so much time for internet debating lol. :)
I've been deeply invested in things like this for a while now, mostly studying and researching for a future project on existentialism and what makes up reality. I've run into Dean Radin's world a few times (oddly when digging into Aether/Ether theories), and my impression him as someone with a strict scientific commitment but open mind to playing devil's advocate is:
He's very, very passionate about his ideas and research. So passionate that he's willing to undermine scientific rigor in exchange for cherry picking results that he wanted and side-stepping placebo effects so he can continue deeper down his path rather than testing and retesting his original concepts. This lack of peer review makes more interesting ideas and material, but removes credibility and requires faith from the reader.
This is generally fine and harmless, albeit a little obnoxious as his method of dealing with the criticism he invited with his lack of scientific rigor is to overwhelm the critic with cherry picked, out of context white papers, most of which he himself authored. Science can't exist in an echo chamber. It has to be selfless. You have a hypothesis, and then you dedicate the rest of your time on that project to disproving your own hypothesis. Then you invite others to do the same. This is how we know what we know about the world around us, and this is how we make meaningful progress. Unfortunately if that process is being sidestepped, whether it be for money or out of passion or just plain impatience, then the ideas remain fictitious thought-experiments.
I won't say Dean Radin is a quack, because (from the bit I've seen) he does seem legitimately passionate in his own isolated studies. When I think of "quack" I think more of someone who is intentionally misleading people to make money. But I do think he has no scientific credibility, and I think he's probably comfortable with that at this point. Interesting? Sure. But for my coverage he's too easily refuted. That refute is a brick wall that prevents the skeptic from caring. A whole lot of people were skeptical about relativity, but instead of attacking skeptics, Einstein encouraged them to test it. Now we're having this conversation on technology that was literally built on it. Science gonna science brah. :)
Fuxking Poe's Law.
As a long time Renoise user it's really exciting to not only see a product like this but one that's got some genuine buzz and interest from an audience that doesn't normally go for trackers.
This is a super engaging demo of how powerful they can be. Nice job.
Same here, its always nice to see trackers getting a bit of attention. For me I tried every daw under the sun before discovering renoise and finding it just clicked better than any other daw (tho I do wish they would add native synthesis, I know theres VST's but they rarely work as well or fit in as nicely as the native devices)
Renoise Mentioned! 🎉
@@bigbodgethis is exactly how i felt... daws are great, but getting a tracker is what made electronic music "click" for me. so much easier and the workflow is just extremely satisfying
Completely switched from my Akai mpc x and other sort of stand alone daw type instruments to the polyend plus a couple days ago. I’ve already made more music and had more fun than I’ve had trying to load and figure out the millions of packs and fx on many other instruments. This is going to remain in my collection forever, can’t wait to see what they come up with to add onto it. Everything they do is absolutely amazing.
Thank you Benn!
You guys should send me one too
@@hypebeastdad They sent me one! I just had to pay for it... Worth every cent.
@@AlchemicalAudio same here I've had one for a while. working on it now!
I finally know how the music for all those crackz and serial generators were made!
whats a crack ?? rofl serial generator ?? hahahaha
TRY
BEFORE BUY
gunforhirenz you’re young. There were times before you were born.
lol underrated comment
Who knew warez and Demo scenes were so aligned!
god anyone giving the demoscene acknowledgement in 2020 is amazing thank you so much for that little segment, gave me crazy nostalgia
the Amiga Demo scene still RuLeZs 🤟♥️
Trackers are the easiest music tools I have ever used. I first played with that on the Amiga and composed dozens of tracks. It was so easy !
Then migrated to the PC and FT2.
Since then, my dream has always been to see a hardware using the same Amiga tracker but with a mix of analogue and digital sounds. This one is almost there... Not missing a lot to be the perfect hardware tracker.
And the beauty of OS updates is that it still might become perfect after feedback from users.
The loved my Amiga. I lived in San Francisco in the 80's and witnessed the parallel rise of the first Apple computers battling with primitive PCs and Commodore. I remember it being a badge of honor for programmers to fit their amazingly feature laden programs on one floppy. For a few years it looked like the Amiga was going to win.
If this thing has midi out, theres a good chance the holes in its capabilities can be filled by just hooking up some gear that can do it. For me what would have made it perfect would be some cv/gate outs to fit it into the modular setup. That would be *amazing*. Maybe for their next version they might consider something like that.
I hope Polyend is giving you kickbacks because I just preordered one thanks to you.
Ditto
Me too
Same. This thing is rad.
Same
Trackers and Modules are still amazing. Made my first musical steps with Modplug Tracker for windows. Unfortunately not on a Commodore Amiga with Pro Tracker... never had one but that would have been awesome. And hey, did you know the games "Unreal" and "Unreal Tournament" were the last commercial videogames that used this module format for it's ingame Music? Not only did it help to keep the filesize small but it also allowed better and easier use of dynamic scores and sequence loops. And there was no lossy compression either. Module music format (no matter if MOD, IT, XM or S3M) are super flexible and still very useful today.
My tracker of choice back in the days was OctaMED :D
mine too :D
I work exactly in this form in 1996-2000 under MS-DOS Mode....in the program called Impulse Tracker...an program for electronic music! I like that! ❤
I liked the history of trackers! I'm a bit younger but old enough to remember the old days of the internet. I'm a DAW guy who has started learning trackers for video game music. Most popular ones right now are Famitracker, Deflemask, LSDJ. I tell people that trackers are like a more "programmerly" approach to music. I can input basic notes, but if anybody has tips for more advanced stuff like effects, arpeggios, grooves, voice switching fluently, etc I've been trying to learn from demo files...
this thing looks perfect for my use case. i unintentionally first learned music sequencing with VSTs and such on renoise; i have always found its display mode super elegant and intuitive once you break past the funky appearance. a physical groovebox built to be as intuitive a controller as possible for this is basically a dream.
wow! that song in a background you made with tracker... last time I heard it like 15 or more years ago and it was one of my favs at the time when i started partying and dj! what a flashback! man, thanks for this one! 🙏🤜🤛
where can i find it please? 🙏
I really like this little thing. Very cool indeed. Brings back memories of Soundtracker, NoiseTracker, and MED, though obviously a lot more powerful. I'm pretty tempted to get one. I do have one peeve, which isn't the end of the world, but an irritant nonetheless: 3.5mm jack MIDI connectors. Whilst I appreciate the fact that they're more compact, and easier to plug in, for quite some time there were two competing wiring standards, and I can never remember which one won. The point is you end up having to deal with a pile of these little 3.5mm to DIN dongles for both standards depending on what gear you have, which I don't love. Yes, the DIN connector is bulky and a bit fiddly to deal with when you're trying to plug one in and can't see the socket properly, but it at least there's only one standard to worry about. Anyway, moaning over: great video - thank you!
Hi,
I just discovered your channel and I'm thrilled to have witnessed you described what were the demo scene and trackers with so much passion, accuracy and simplicity.
You emphasized what was the core of the demo scene true nature, trying to do defeat the computing power limitations with pure optimizations, tricks and hacks to produce the art that was beyond what was even thinkable by anyone at that time.
I'm 41 years old and I love you for that shared moment.
Peace!
The first music I ever made on a computer was with Sound Tracker on the Amiga.
When Fasttracker came along (DOS program) it was pretty mind blowingly powerful.
aboslutely no good reason for sharing that information.
Great historical context! I gotta say this is one of the most even-handed yet enticing overview I have seen of the product.
Really, as a c64 composer in the early nineties I'd like the whole concept - melancholia maybe, but after your preview, especially the grainer-section and and the hopefully expected change in the slicer-section I guess I exchange all my gear for the Medusa and the tracker. Love it
Beaker Sunset! This was the first track of yours I heard! I actually used it as the music for a video I made of my family skiing when I was a kid. 😂
Nice little Monster!
I used to produce way more tracks with Fast Tracker2 in 1998 than with Ableton today
I agree that price is really good. Def gonna get it
P.S:You look like flashbulb...
*sees bandcamp link*
oh. So i just gonna say that you're still one of the best for me along with AFX and Venetian Snares and others. Your generation inspired my generation to make interesting music
reading the description, happy to have you on the tracker bandwagon. I love arranging percussion with trackers especially. ok, time to actually, like, watch
I've come back to this video almost every month because it's the best video on this thing, I'd love to see some more of you somehow see this Benn.
That 18 year old song near the beginning is super cool.
I brought a Polyend Tracker, and instantly went "Ohhwhathaveidone..." but ohhh I love it to bits, i have a portable power bank, speaker UDG hard case and can take it anywhere I go. I cant play a keyboard for toffee, so this is perfect for helping me along.
Damn, i was expecting that to be at least a grand. That is a ton of power in a tiny, high quality box for not much cash.
$600
My first tracker was OctaMed, on the Amiga 1000.
Then I used ScreamTracker 3, then FastTracker 2, then Impulse Tracker 2.14 on the PC.
Then I moved to a proper DAW and never looked back.
I still have all of my MOD/MED/S3M/XM/IT files!
lmao, love the humor dude. I started with trackers back in the day, that was how I discovered computers were starting to become capable for actually creating music, I'm kinda itching to try one of these, I'm not sure if it's because I'd use it, or just a sense of nostalgia, but thanks for the video.
Got mine two weeks ago, first time on any kind of tracker and loving it!
I am listening to your music on Spotify and am surprized of the classic quality (piano and violin). The atmospherics (ambient) are quite pleasing also.
Ah takes me back to my Tracker days. Listening to Aphex Twin while getting frustrated with my very old and very slow PC. Awesome vid! Preordered mine already. 😎
I used to spend hours making music on a tracker on a Pentium 133.. I also want this bad 😆
I would really love to see your approach on a deluge. You always take things in a really interesting direction which I would never go....I would like to see that.
Thanks! I've had requests for years to do a Deluge feature and hit them up about it years ago. Maybe they'll eventually send one over. 🤷♂️
@@BennJordan Damn I want that video so much I might let them know.
Man. You and a few peoples' videos got me SO HYPED on this Polyend Tracker. I started researching it with absolutely no intention to want to buy one. It was just by chance because I saw a giveaway and then son Jonwayne producing hip hop on this. Long story short, something about this just seems so WEIRD but makes a LOT of sense. Thanks for the videos, man. Very inspiring.
Wow, trackers are really cool! I love thinking about how differences in the presentation of workflow can affect the music that's made. I also really appreciate you taking the time to learn the workflow before showing this to us, you make it look like it's so easy and fun to use!
Love it! Great job, and I like the blabber in the beginning. It was funny. Somehow you highlighted all of the things I’ve been wondering about this thing. Can’t wait till they ship out!
I've been eyeing this for a minute. After he demonstrated it's ability to sample from radio like the elektron op-1 I was 💯 sold! Def grabbing one...
Speaking of the Demo scene, I recently picked up an FPGA platform called Mister, which has the best C64/SID implementation I’ve heard, outside of the real thing. Listening to all the classic demos has been more enjoyable than using Mister for its primary intention, retro gaming. It’s incredible what 80s musicians were able to accomplish, even before trackers were a thing and they had to program their tracks in machine language. Helps you appreciate just how easy we have it today with modern music tech!
So nice to see someone actually proficient in tracking trying this thing out! Sounds great!
Oh wow... 90s solo cup-design shirt, awesome technology, great presentation - and that tasty, tasty jungle-track .. Benn Jordan is simply a treasure! Love ya, man :)
Nice presentation Benn and Gear, will pick one up when this dark corona cloud clears up. I hope the development for the software side of this will remain active as there is plenty room for improvement afaics. A good idea machine for sure.
This looks insane! Grew up using trackers I need this 😍. Great demo!
Man... The way you handle it makes it look so light. I've been trying to find a good portable device for making beats and this looks like what I've been wanting despite the older style of sequencer.
I have an OP-1 and it's great but hard for travel as there aren't project files and 6 minutes of tape can fill up pretty quick.
I have an OP-Z and it's also fun and small and easy to carry but the sampler leaves much to be desired plus pairing with a phone kills the battery quick.
I've had a Deluge which has tons of possibilities, it's a little big but not too bad. But you can't export tracks or stems to mix in a DAW and the built in effects leave much to be desired.
I had an MPC Live but it felt too much like a DAW in a box and the workflow was clumsy compared to Maschine or Ableton (with Push 2). And it was too big to truly be considered portable.
And I have a Digitakt but the lack of synth engines and small amount of internal storage limits it. I don't mind the mono samples or 8 tracks (and the Polyend Mimicks this) but the Digitakt is also just a little heavy and chunky for portability. Also a smallish octave range.
But this has expandable storage, two sample based synth engines, a small footprint and apparently weight, and a lot of interesting sequencing effects. Plus it just powers on with USB C?
Yeah this looks like my dream. I think I'm gonna have to sell my Digitakt for this.
I made music with Fast Tracker II and Modplug Tracker before i switched to FL Studio and i am really excited about this.
Just finding out about it cause of your video .
Never saw anything about it or heard anything about it.
Great review Benn! I hope Polyend will also support the Tracker's OS with different track lengths per pattern, for crazy polymeter beats. Also it would be nice if they would allocate a bit more ram per project. Been writing music in trackers since 1992 🙂
Perfect retro shirt. It's the pattern from those cups!
All that's missing in Renoise is granular and modulating start/end time of samples. Great video!
I watched your Medusa video and I bought one ...now I’m looking at this tracker I like polyends design too
I want one! Dig the track you played before the curiosity bit. You should release an album via videos of the tracker running the tracks!
Been making music since the late '90's. Started with hardware. This reminds me of the Yamaha RM1X sequencer, which I found very intuitive...
iLL OgicK Yup. Loved the Rm1x and it was one of the first things I thought of when watching the workflow of this box. The big screen on this unit would give this a big advantage over the Rm1x, depending on how intuitive this is to use.
@@kelseydaniels7283 that and sampling capabilities, which I Know they made into the newer silver "RM1X" the name escapes me ATM think it was something 9? Anyway yes, it has my interest peaked...
@@illogick9062 it was the rs 7000. 👍
I use LSDJ a lot and love the granular detail of modifying each step in a track. This looks perfect for me.
That bass line with random wavetable position sounds so good. I'd end up just listening to that loop for way too long.
Been using trackers since 1989. You missed the best thing about them, insert and delete SHIFT all the notes after the cursor position. This is amazing for quickly experiementing with different timings and is the key reason I still love trackers over piano roll (not that they couldn't add a note cursor/insert functions, they just haven't). Also how the effects are PER NOTE and WHILE the note is playing. Very hard to do that at all on piano roll sequencers (which is why drumnbass producers love trackers)
Here's a few suggestions for them.
1) Add an "Octamed" style echo. It physically places notes in empty note slots. It has the awesome side effect of no echo notes playing while the main notes play, which would take a heap of messing about with sidechaining to do normally.
2) Allow export per instrument as well (yes including notes getting cut off from another instruments playing in the same track). This would bring it much closer to current work flows in post.
3) Does the keyboard have a mode for traditional row based keyboard with white keys on 1, black on 2, white +1 octave on 3, black +1 octave on 4th row?
4) Why limit it to 8 tracks?
Trippy... I've never seen this type of sequence programming. Pretty cool!
Ordered my Polyend Tracker today. I tried Renoise and love it. It's just fun. But I prefer to stay away from my computer as I already stand in front of it all day. Hopefully it's good!
Just purchased one on Reverb. Seems like an awesome piece of gear, but but based most of the stuffed I heard people play on it, it seems like mainly for people who wanna mimic Aphex Twin / Squarepusher. Still excited to play with it.
Love the background neutron in the eurorack. Things a BEAST!
nice how you catched by chance the "being creative" phrase on the radio :)
This is a fantastic demo Benn! Best one I’ve seen yet & I’ve been drinking these all up like so many glasses of dry sherry. You paint a very clear picture of what the Tracker is capable of & it’s driving me crazy that thing isn’t on the market yet; would be a perfect off-hour wait state time killer/user for this exact moment in history.
Firstly, thank you for the history lesson. I had a totally skewed idea of what a tracker was, thinking it was all about numerical input and nerdy lists. I am not an IDM artist and I do not have attention deficiency or obsessive compulsive tendencies rather I am butterfly's minded and untidy. Startlingly, what you show me here is a musical instrument with strikingly powerful capabilities which I would have completely overlooked were it not for the work you have done on the Polyend Play.
This is one of the best demos of this I've seen, def gonna get the new tracker+
Yeah thanks for a great video on the Polyend Tracker. Makes more sence now. Great unit.
In 2024, I spent 30 minutes watching this man create the music to a new level in the Xmen Sega game I thought I had left in the 90s. It's been over 30 years. I will never forgive you, Benathan.
I wish there was a halfway between Polyend Tracker and the NerdSeq. The CV interfaces on the NerdSeq (and some of the software choices there) are awesome. I'm just loving the additional buttons/interface on the Polyend Tracker too! But the ER-301 + Nerdseq is a complex and cool option too!
Polyend Tracker + Poly2 sounds like it'd be about perfect for what you need.
Took me 8 minutes to notice the sweet 90's graphics on your t-shirt!!
I didn't even know that Trackers existed before this video. Thanks!
Andre Agassi called - he wants his shirt back. hehehe.. great review... now on my purchase list!
PS. aware this is the Jazz cup design..
Slick Rick is related to the humpty hump guy I believe
the best comparison would be the MPC ONE.
I just listened your new album fantastic as usual
thanks, you really helped to demonstrate the essence of this thing and trackers in general :-) So excited, finally a portable hardware tracker sampler! The simplicity and power of this is bang on - Go Polyend!
Ooooh. That's a nice interface. Sample effect preview in particular. Man I haven't played with renoise in so long....
Damn ure video really inspired and sold me on this...its got a lot of interesting capabilities as a standalone instrument
I started with ModPlug Tracker... Currently using ReNoise. Give it a try if the traditional DAW workflow is not for you.
Great video! I'm glad you got a sponsor for the channel. About the tracker, it's unfortunate some quirks feel so weird to have been left out, e.g. virtual channels (aka keeping the current sound on a channel playing with its envelope if you play a new sound on the same channel) is something that was solved years ago, and with so few channels available it seems to be a (workable) pain. I hope it's something that can be shoehorned in before the release, if the processing power is sufficient. I'm happy you're getting your fun and I'm glad it's great if you're new to trackers, but as a current tracker user it kinda feels like a step back in some ways.
Envelope belongs to an instrument not a track.
21:29 lol this song is so amazing!!
SHIT! YOU AIN'T KIDDING
2:20 Loved how you chose Dead Lock in the screenshot of FT. Phenomenal song... I think Elwood was around 15 or 16 when he did that which still astounds me to this day.
Some Videogame Milestones like Megaman's Dr. Wily theme were made on software like this, HUGE RESPECT.
This is cool and all but your new album is even cooler. good lord
That rap vocal granular thing sounds like venetian snares' fool the detector. I like the way it sounds and this brings insight on how it might have been done.
Best demo so far! Why isn't anyone showing jungle some love with this?
OEOEO
th-cam.com/video/MiZmhyka7wU/w-d-xo.html
This is the best Demo I've seen so far ! NICE :-)
Dude thanx for this content! I appreciate the intro info on trackers.
It's cool that you did talk about history of trackers before the demo !
OMG that’s awesome! Thank you !
Love that appropriately gaudy Renoise theme.
I think the Terminal Velocity song from Boondock Saints was made entirely on this machine.
I like the table cloth
If you are interested in the "tracker" method of creating music, have never tried it, but would like to get your feet wet before purchasing this hardware (when it is released), one of the best, *FREE* software music trackers is Psycle Modular Music Creation Studio. (Google "psycle" for the web sight and download) The last update was 2017 that I'm aware of, for Windows 10 compatibility, and there is little activity in the forums these days, but this is still a very powerful and versatile tracker style music studio. Up to 64 tracks or 64 voices, an infinite number of pattern "pages" with page sequencing commands. The same thing applies as in this machine in that a single track can trigger a note from any instrument or sample in your library - in other words, you don't assign any one instrument, wave or sample, or oscillator to a given track. The library of VST plugins comes fairly packed with editable and "preset" instruments including several types of sample players, a MIDI "font" player, a wealth of effects plugins, an external MIDI interface with the ability to record live from the external source or from the computer keyboard. The recording ability includes instrument control "tweaks" with a robust code control over timing and other general interface controls. It's fairly intuitive to be able to produce satisfying results from the very start. I have created full symphony pieces with it using sample libraries found around the internet, to improvisational jazz using the recording feature, to full blown "techno", looped pieces sounding similar to modular synthesis. It uses VST standard program interfacing so you can even create your own VSTs (instruments / oscillators) using some of the various VST creation labs available (like SynthMaker).
This seems like it’d make Trackers far more tolerable for me to have such a well-designed hardware controller like this. I’ve messed around with Sunvox and Deflemask on iPad, which are probably far more suited to a desktop environment, with proper qwerty keyboard mappings.
Polyend tracker is definitely reasonably priced. Tempting!
I wasn't interested in Trackers until watching this. This seems like a really dope machine for creating chaos.
“…a tantalizing amount of time…” Dude I fuckin love you 😂😂😂
Trackers where my way into music on anything that wasnt a guitar in the 90s. Digitracker on a 486 scrapped together from parts and a Gravis Ultrasound card, and holy shit did we push that fucker to the edge. In our shitful sharehouse studio featuring a 4 track tape recorder, a casio organ, a bunch of guitar amps and digitracker we where creating our own demented take on trip-hop and I swear to god we where making what the kids now call "Trap" beats back in the mid 90s, and we didnt really know what to call it, but we'd funble together backyard gigs with these contraptions and everyone would turn up and seem to enjoy it. Retrospectively it was pretty spazzy but at the time it was great. We tried to do drum and bass stuff too, but our stuff was trash so we gave up and went with what we know. Ah I miss those days. Get off my lawn.
I watched a diff video on the tracker and thought it looked cheap and unimpressive.
Now I watch you use it and it looks like something that would keep me hooked for hrs! Its like a synth that uses your samples as the wave form
IM TRULY AMAZED HOW YOU MAKE EVERYTHING JUST SOUND SO ............WELL YOU! ONCE AGAIN EXCELLENT VID! TRULY YOURS A MASSIVE FAN.
Looks like Aphex Twin had this machine back in the 90's
Just got this in the mail. I’m a drummer by trade so this is whole new territory, but I’m stoked. I also got a Roland tr-6s and Arturia minibrute so shit is about to get weirrrd
great job explaining. thx!
the white buttons could be LED colored, so it could easily turn in a keyboard.
This really helped, thank you! It was exactly what I needed to see
Now I don't have to regret selling my Amiga 500 anymore! Hyped. I can give ReNoise a break.
Also Benn, Thank you! To hear your original track evolve and mutate on this video is very inspiring.
Love what you did with it.