Polyend's Wondrous Hardware Tracker

hey there how you doing hope you're well this is a little awkward I'm used to doing these monologues in front of a live studio audience and Hollywood it's like we're in this weird place where coronavirus themes or jokes aren't funny and it's not that they're offensive but seemingly every other edge lord DJ and producer uploaded a CO vid 19 mixed to SoundCloud or YouTube and y'all Brune dit so now I'm just like yeah I'll avoid the topic altogether but now you and I are like a couple laying in bed after sexual dysfunction so yeah that's a thing we probably have to deal with and it's gonna be okay probably and you know what else is there to say about it right now I guess just it's one of those you know check out this really insane hardware tracker if you were making electronic music in the 1990s you can most likely skip past this part what is a tracker a tracker is an alternative and different and rather peculiar way of making music especially if you're used to like a DA or a score or a piano rule instead of going left to right and programming notes on a chromatic scale you're going from top to bottom and programming notes in things called steps and then a bunch of perimeters in a more matrix e way different trackers have different perks but generally each track is not limited to one voice the way it would be in a standard DAW with each single step you can change the voice for example if I wanted to play AC major 7th chord that is four different notes I would have to use four different tracks to do it and that could be on step one but step two could be for different instruments this is both powerful and limiting at the same time and that results in a pretty radically different structure of songwriting the first tracker was called the ultimate sound tracker and it was released for Amiga 33 years ago and its purpose was to give musicians or game makers a tool to create music for their games not long after this the top-down format pretty popular game composers and more and more pieces of software started coming out the Fairlight CMI even had a tracker so fast-forward a little bit to the ninth 90s computers are now powerful enough to handle CD quality audio and sampling and trackers are kind of taken off you have scream tracker and fast tracker which can handle 32 tracks at once and this point in time is when I first started hearing about them for those of you under the age of 30 let me tell you a little bit about the early 90s the internet existed but it was very very slow so slow that an image the size of 320 by 240 pixels took a tantalizingly long time to load a file the size of an mp3 was way too big to be practically sent from one person to another and a MIDI file sounded different depending on the sound card you played it on so this sort of slow data trickle and the growing community of the internet brought together a bunch of really talented developers and artists to create what is now referred to as the demo scene so you know how you'll have an update for Photoshop or a VST plugin or something and every single new version uses more RAM and run slower despite not having that many new features the demo scene is the polar opposite of that the whole point of it is to cram as much data into a program as possible at a competitive level and it's incredible the video you see and the music you hear right now is an executable file that is four kilobytes four kilobytes it doesn't require any DLLs or plugins or libraries it just runs on four kilobytes now a thumbnail that you might see next to this video is about 75 times larger and file size than this five-minute audio video presentation in high definition I don't wanna get too far into the demo scene here there are tons of resources where you can learn about browse or participate in it all over the internet including on YouTube these demos needed the audio and music to be as competitively efficient as the video rendering and a great way to accomplish that was using mod files a mod file is a bit like a MIDI file except that it also includes instruments waveform samples and so on and trackers became synonymous with mod files and if you were making anything for the demo scene you are most likely using fast track or to moving into the late 90s and 2000's trackers kind of became associated at least in my head with American IDM artists like Venetian Snares and machine drum were pretty much only using trackers music at the time and then an artist's like deadmau5 for example started with trackers and then moved on to other things as Ableton and fruity loops FL studio came around they kind of filled in that gap between trackers and DAWs which I think attracted a lot of people the trackers and trackers actually slipped in popularity a little bit however that being said there's a very powerful tracker called renoise that has a massive user base and it's pretty popular I venture to say that trackers are the overwhelmingly popular choice for chip tune musicians especially considering that LS DJ and other homebrew carts are actual trackers that run on Gameboy consoles so where does that leave Moines well the last time I can remember formally using a tracker was to make the track that you're hearing now and that was over 18 years ago and to be completely honest trackers never really appealed to me because my musical journey kind of started with jazz charts and improv and this is just sort of the opposite of them so when Polly N sent me this bad boy to check out my expectations were a little conflicted on one hand I have been ignoring trackers for most of my professional life and on the other hand every single thing that Polly and has ever sent me has gone beyond this YouTube channel and worked its way into my musical workflow as a professional musician so what you're about to see is not a tracker musician or a tracker expert showing you the first hardware tracker about two weeks ago I was akin to an eighth being handed an iPhone but the UI actually dulled the learning curve quite a bit and this is pretty easy to learn and get a round on and make some tracks with and so I'm pretty comfortable to show you how it works I think it's gonna go okay before I begin let's go over the specs and it's safe to say that the hardware specs are gonna be pretty much the same because this comes out in a few months the software specs are going to be improved upon as this is a beta version so we have an output that doubles as a headphone jack it comes with a little connector to facilitate that has a line in has a mic in has a MIDI in and media out has a micro SD card slot and then it has a USB C power slot this thing doesn't actually take that much power and I was able to power it using one of those little phone Bank chargers for well it didn't even get to 50% battery out by the time I was music on and after an hour or so so it's safe to say that this is pretty easy to power portably the unit's really sturdy with the metal build I think this is metal or this is like the most hardcore plastic I have ever seen but I think it's metal I'm gonna stick with metal it has mechanical keys this is not a touchscreen and initially I was craving a touchscreen but after using it for about a minute and seeing how the workflow works the only time I would actually touch the screen would be by accident so I actually thank God it's not a touchscreen inside we have loads of envelopes and LFOs and ways to modulate the instruments and the instruments can be made up of samples loops waveforms slices grains from a granulator and of course like any good old-school tracker wave tables there is an onboard FM radio and I know that some of you are baseball fans and you're gonna want to take a break from music and think about that sweet smell of grass and crack of the bat and listen to the game but you can also sample things from it or make wave tables from it right out of thin air the effects list is pretty big and it keeps growing and that applies from everything from sends to the sample editor all the way to per step which is probably the most important and you'll see why soon one of the most unique and my favorite attributes to the tracker is the option for random probability and the performance mode which allows you to make generative music if you're not used to trackers and you're just looking at this like it's a groov box or something one thing you might be grumbling about is the lack of multiple outs however with the tracker workflow you have to understand that like channel one could be a kick drum for that first step and the second step it could be a hi-hat and the third step it could be a snare and if you keep changing these instruments on a per step basis like you're generally supposed to with the tracker that's how its most powerful then you kind of lose the point of having multiple outs because you would want a kick drum multiple out to sidechain a bass from another instrument or something like that well it's a little different that being said if you are attached to this workflow for some reason such as you always like having the kick drum separate when you're mastering or compressing a final mix you have the option of leaving one of your channels to be only the kick drum then the tracker actually exports stems which you can just drag and drop off the SD card into a session elsewhere all right enough you happen let's play with this thing and Yap over there this is the tracker and a heads up there might be a little bit of background noise here because it's 90 degrees in Georgia today and I am NOT closing my window another thing you should know this is still in beta it's not a finished product so like most trackers at its heart this is a sampler and it actually has an FM radio on it great thing about fax now I'm gonna try and scroll through this and not get copyrighted music let's see if we can do that also I have pretty terrible radio reception I'm in a basement studio that's like patted by multiple walls so this works a lot better upstairs it sounds like some good supportive times this was day 16 of the NBA suspension and play with a restart date still very unclear all 30 team facilities have been shuttered so Hawks coach Lloyd Pierre says he's being creative and trying to remain connected to okay so we just took this little bit here so I went back and I loaded the entire sample here and basically these little pads we could do that and we can also use a MIDI keyboard also there's a bunch of different levels of undo here like a ridiculous number of undo levels it's pretty great so being creative actually I'm gonna put an amplifier on there being create because I want it to be nice and loud for when I go to sample playback now this is where things get really interesting I could do a for loop being creative being create into the higher notes that actually can be useful but I can also slice it up in which but we'll do that with a beat later wavetable this is where we get really interesting here [Music] I'm gonna press instrument I'm gonna tune it down a bit I'm also going to put a low-pass filter on there and a little bit of resonance then I'm going to go into this little envelope section here where I can have a modulator whether it be an envelope or an LFO on my wave table position or my granular position if I use the granulator which we'll get into in a minute also panning in volume but for right now cutoff so let's do that [Music] also there's a reverb send and there may be some more effects sends and currently the reverb is literally just a placeholder this isn't the algorithm that will be in the finished product so this is just a beta thing it's not really all that beautiful sounding yet and you won't hear this one if you buy this so now we got a tracker and let's start tracking so basically each time I press this note it's going to go down a step so [Music] let's load some kick drums whoo that one sounds it sounds about right all right let's get some snares up in here and as you could see once you get used to this the work flow is actually mighty fast and remember any of these samples that I load here can be and remember any and remember any of these samples that I load here can be modified in that previous sample editing system that we have or it could even extract the wave table or you can even get granular with it let's get a hi-hat these are all just xox boxes I suppose that work and let's go back to our pattern so now I'm gonna change the instrument to a kick and let's say I just want to kick every four steps alright and this one will be my snare let's just do the standard four on the floor we're gonna now have a snare every eight steps here we have a hi-hat okay so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna select all of these all the way down to the 32nd step and I'm gonna go to fill and let's fill each to constant with instrument for and go and now that was very easy now we can just have I'm a silly boy I forgot that last snare let's put that guy in there and maybe we could just so let's get one more interesting we have these little effects here for each step so let's put a roll these are probably the easiest to show off little roll in here and the roll effect basically you can hear it gives you a little example of what it's doing in each one so do that maybe here we could have it like that and get really really glitchy sounding with this stuff so in addition to that we can have another effect we could have let's say chance alright so the chance is exactly what it sounds here is a 51% chance that this sound will play also you could use the pad so you don't have to rotate to your setting each time so now now we have something that's getting a little bit generative let's play with this instrument a little bit to make it a little more tolerable sounding let's add some effects to our melody channel so here's Glide that sounds so we could add that all over the place we could edit our wave table position if you want to get really really goofy oh it's just randomize oh you know what we can do actually if you want to hit if you want to get really really really goofy with this we could press shift I could go all the way down maybe actually be able to do this with the knob but I'm hardcore and press fill let's go random the random effect that we're gonna do is wave table position we're gonna go random from 1 to 100 and then we're gonna fill that boom so obviously this isn't mixed very well so let's kind of tidy up some of these samples here and then you'll notice in that odd wavetable thing that's going on that was just random it some parts are a little bit louder than others so let's actually put a limiter over this whole thing and we also have a bit depth so if we want to make it 8-bit orbit but let's stick with sixteen so we have four more tracks to use so let's load another sample why don't we this is just a library of wave tables that I have um I kind of want something to be a little base here I want to put maybe a baseline under this whole thing so let's tune it down [Music] I'm going to put a low pass filter on that again that's a high pass filter silly there we go [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so now our song sounds a little bit more spatially fun and that sample is actually has an LFO modulating it every two steps rather than inserting that just to I guess be different and finally let's put in a lead why don't lay on the sixth channel a good square would be nice wonderful let's actually try some real-time recording on the hold-down record and a play a little bit too early on that one yeah [Music] [Music] so that's not really the best song in the world but that's generally how you make a pattern um let me open some other things that have made here's a song so a song that would basically plays a bunch of different patterns here are the patterns that directed uh tons of patterns and the song mode plays them all in the order in which you define this one's 175 BPM can you guess what genre this would be I would guess jungle [Music] [Music] you [Music] did you know that eating one egg per day is as harmful as being a full-time cigarette smoker did you know that cows contribute more to global warming than every single thing else on earth combined did you know that eating a high-fat and low-carb diet is an effective treatment for asthma autism and cancer did you know that the infamous double slit experiment enables like this to have magic healing powers people have been asking Netflix and other streaming services for a really long time to sort of up the bar and the standards of what they consider educational or documentary and it's fallen on deaf ears but in the meantime I'm really glad to be a partner with curiosity stream curiosity stream is like the Netflix of documentaries and they have it on virtually any platform that you can think of right now they have series on dark matter dark energy astrophysics quantum computing and that's just physics those are things that I'm really into for some reason they also have massive troves of content on biology geology genetics evolution history I've actually been a subscriber to curiosity stream before this partnership began I absolutely love it and it's really cheap it's $20 a year and they have a monthly option as well if you click that link down there you can get a free trial and you can also help support this channel in the process so stay inside stay healthy stay sane and entertained while you stay inside and get smarter while you're doing it click the link below so as promised I will show off some of that granular stuff too so let's what a sample that is not a simple wave table what's lewd I think it put some low wrap samples on here let's go through some some wrap one-shots really happy guy shorty shouting so call me Slick Rick yeah okay let's go that one all right Slick Rick let's let's hit the granular slopes here buddy all right so I'm gonna make this granular all right sick Rick you're Slick Rick rather if you want to make this not as abrasive you can go to triangle or gauss triangle sounds like cost sounds like you can also have it ping-pong which also helps what that's like triangle this gets kind of insane as you can okay so that's our sample right and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to record a little pattern I don't even know I guess I'll just what select all these and then we can go to fill and that fill can be let's go each one so each one's going to be a random Oh about position and again random from 1 to 800 that is where it's picking the random from and fill and let's hear that you can play with this and again good bring in some envelopes so now let's play with a drum loop which is something we have not done yet and I'm not a huge fan of loops myself but I know that a lot of people are and so I've brought in a couple here let's see breaks classics whoo amen that's a grave on right all right all right so we have Amen here and we can make it a slice we can have it auto slice and now we have that did a really good job at auto slicing lamb by the way so so fYI as of right now you have pitches instead of slices per different pad I actually emailed them about that and I do believe that you will have the option to choose slices by the time this comes out or in a further firmware update but it doesn't really matter because you can do it another way that is quite possibly a little bit more clever so first of all let's just use that handy fill option to fill all of these with a note and that note can be fill each one with a constant note and that's pretty easy and that note should probably be c5 alright [Music] so as an effect we can actually choose where the slice goes right we can either choose a knob or we can use the pads then so what's fine we could go back and change all these I'm just finding where we're at let's hear it and if we actually wanted to split this up into different samples and use different instruments you could actually then go [Music] use a lot of different effects like that this is actually a pattern I made with the goal of making a delay like they used to do on fast track or two this is the original one and then I added these in here that's a drum thing so you have two little delay lines against you ever here and they're just sort of copying each other also this is a good example of how chords could work [Music] I want to create an entirely generative pattern so let's try to do that so I guess the first thing we would do is we'd go to fill and we would fill each one with let's just say something on the Dorian scale and I'm gonna go with random from maybe c4 to c6 and let's see how that works [Music] so now I'm gonna go press effects and I'm going to mess with that chance all the way down I'm let's try and just find like a 50 percent all the way down and now now there's a 50% chance that each one of these steps will play [Music] cool and I guess just for the sake of making this sound a little more diverse I guess I'll pan or maybe affect the cutoff a little bit differently in each one of these notes so on this channel let's use the exact same sound and let's select all again and I'm gonna fill every four notes so each four in the Dorian scale random from let's go down to like c3 and let's go up to maybe I don't know g4 or something alright and let's try that [Music] maybe it's a little bit too low but we could also tune this entire thing up higher [Music] so this one I'm gonna fool with the panning a little bit so let's just set the panning to Center for each one or one now can be noticeable not a painting now in fx2 I'm going to have a random effects value so now all of the paintings can be random for each step every single time so let's do one more a little like counterpoint overture here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fill it with a note let's go with each one let's sort of do the same thing we've been doing maybe a little bit higher okay fill [Music] so what's happening here is we actually have this affecting the filter LFO and there's a 4% chance that the third channel will play a note this sounds a little silly I should probably make these a little slower [Music] you can also randomize the instrument you're using per step randomize a lot of different effects so this is very very capable of making either semi generative or pretty much completely generative music performance mode allows you to play different patterns for each track so if I were to for example have eight different patterns that all had different lengths then you could make a pretty radical polyrhythmic sequence so that is the pollen tracker in its current pre-release state you can sample pretty much anything you want either through the input or FM radio you both have a both mic and a line and input you can manipulate those samples you could grab wave tables from those samples you can grab slices or grains from those samples you can edit them and then you can do crazy things and the sequencer with them and you can make finished tracks now again some of you are probably saying well I can't really make a complete track on this because it doesn't have multiple outs but you have no fear you could just export stems for each single pattern and then you can do all of your post-production in a DAW if you want to be that I guess Pro about things of course understand that exporting WAV file stems of your tracks does not entirely negate the usefulness of having multiple outs but we're talking about a portable device here and I think that it's a pretty good trade-off for what you're getting that is the tracker and poly unda actually surprised me a little bit with the pricing it is on pre-order for 599 US dollars and for a sampler sequencer synthesizer just an overall performance box that's a pretty damn good price the closest piece of hardware that does this in this sort of price area would be the digit act which is not nearly as innovative not as featured and it still cost a couple hundred bucks more after a couple weeks I've just sort of casually playing with this thing around the house weirdly I think the closest thing that I would compare it to is a teenage engineering op one and while they're both very different groove boxes I guess you could say if you're gonna categories them that way they both are very innovative there very addictive and they're both very powerful the goal is us just losing ourselves and losing hours of time while playing and creating music and that should be the goal of literally every piece of music here right that being said if I'm gonna make that comparison that I have to say that the OP one is nine years old it's not going to be as powerful it is definitely not as well built as the tracker and it costs over twice as much as the tracker cost and to be totally honest I'd rather be quarantined with the tracker if you enjoyed what you saw here if you learned anything subscribe to the channel there's anything you want me to cover in the future let me know in the comments if you're looking for something new to listen to I just released a full-length album I'll link to it in the description below and of course if you want to support this channel and if you want to get smarter while you're staying inside during this quarantine and stay and retained then check out curiosity stream the links right down there bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 71,697

Rating: 4.8661418 out of 5

Keywords: polyend, tracker, demo scene, synthesizier, wavetable, hardware, hardware tracker, the flashbulb, granulizer, grains, sampler, groovebox, groove box, midi

Id: PWFHeLjSY7k

Length: 36min 43sec (2203 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020