Thats awesome! Glad i could sow some seeds of inspiration… the UC4 is especially Good with the OP-Z imo…
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When Trash80 started this project years ago, the primary goal actually WAS for it to be a MIDI-only tracker! So yes, it’s able to do all the things you are asking about!
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I have preordered because this looks like what i wanted the OP1 to be (didn’t like the OP1).
The specs on this device are just mind blowing !
-Audio streaming from card
-several synth engines
-can be used as a midi sequencer
-usb midi and audio
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Im going to use the M8 with this for a very compact setup.
This small mixer has usb audio and midi , 4 stereo channels + 1 stereo fx send
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Are there any videos or tutorials out there on adding resolution to a measure? It sounds like you are locked in to 16 lines per phrase. If I wanted to play sextuplets on most trackers (6 notes per beat), I would just make a phrase/measure that has 24 or 48 lines. Is the trick here that I would chain 3 phrases together and speed up the tempo appropriately?
I read the user manual posted above but got confused with the tics, grooves etc. This was something that bothered me about elektron machines, where you can play at higher resolution but it feels as though you are pushed towards 16th notes because of the physical layout of the buttons (imo). Having a screen with adjustable lines per “phrase” like the polyend tracker is pretty cool, and perhaps the M8 works just as well, it’s just a little more complex for me.
Not sure if there’s a specific tute out there (there may be discussion of this in one of the meetup videos on YouTube) but there are definitely several ways of doing this (grooves, hop commands, etc)
So each line has a number of tics. By default this is 6, but within grooves you can set custom number of tics. This allows you to create swing, make patterns in different time signatures, do polyrithmic stuff, and make phrases run at different tempos.
For your use you’d simply set the groove for a phrase to 3 instead of 6. Now you have the pattern playing at double speed.
Edit: sextuplets are a bit trickier but are also possible. Sorry misread your post, doubling speed is a quick way to up the resolution of a phrase.
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Thanks for the explanation, I am not that experienced with trackers and am not sure what tics indicate exactly. Can each tic have it’s own note and parameters? Similar to a retrig but more customizable? I’ll keep digging around in any case.
Edit: It sounds like tics are more an indicator for tempo rather than note resolution, which is an interesting concept for me. So maybe I would change the tic length to 2(?) and chain 3 phrases together to achieve a measure with tuplet notes.
If I understand the question properly, you want to have 6 steps available per Beat of the tempo yes?
This is definitely possible. I would personally set the Groove value to 4 instead of 6 to achieve this.
This means that l, by default (6) each step takes that many Ticks to complete. So, a Beat is 24 total Ticks.
By changing it to 4 instead, we have made the phrase take 6 steps to equal 24 Ticks (4 Ticks per step).
Hopefully this makes sense.
Then, to make things make sense Bar-wise, Hop commands allow a phrase to “complete” earlier than the last Step (F in hexadecimal) so you could make each phrase be 2 Beats at Tempo by putting a Hop command on Step 12 (C in hexadecimal).
This would all amount to 2 phrases being a 4 Beat bar, with 6 steps per Beat.
and now I’ve gone crosseyed
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In M8, the groove screen defines how many ticks you want per each step. It can be defined using 1 to 16 rows that represent each step in the phase, if you only fill out 1 or 2 rows of the groove screen, those rows will loop for the entire phrase, if you fill out 3, it will loop every 3 steps etc. The default groove for a new song looks like this:
00 06
01 06
02 --
03 --
...
Giving you 6 ticks per step (24 ticks per quarter note).
Another thing groove does in M8, if you set a groove row to 0, it will skip that step. So for a basic triplet groove you could do:
00 08
01 08
02 08
03 00
04 --
...
This will give you 3 dotted 16th notes per quarter note, and the playhead will skip every 4th row in the phrase. One could do this 0 tick trick to always skip over the last rows in a phrase too so you do not need to enter a HOP command on every phrase. EG - 3/4 time signature groove:
00 06
01 06
02 06
03 06
04 06
05 06
06 06
07 06
08 06
09 06
0A 06
0B 06
0C 00
0D 00
0E 00
0F 00
Sorry for the post with too many line breaks! 
Edit: There are 32 grooves in a song. Each track can use a different groove with the groove set using the groove command on a phrase row. The default groove 00 is used for all tracks until hitting this command on a specific track.
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Someone on the M8 Discord Meet-up shared a project that uses randomization to create generative ambient music. So cool!
Video link is timestamped btw.
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No worries - appreciate the explanation!
So, the structure of a song is like this?
You make Phrases up on to 12 steps each, then use Chains to chain them into Patterns?
Are the Grooves assigned at the Phrase level or the Pattern level?
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You make phrases up to 16 steps each. Then use a chain to chain phrases together. Song plays chain numbers per track. Groove is assigned on phrase level via a command so therefore can be applied/cued on any step.
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Can someone tell me how staightforward it is to make a headless version to use with a laptop??
I preorder on of these, but want to start to learn it…
Is it better with the pc keyboard or do you need a gamepad??
Thanks
Edit just reading the github now
Not yet, I did think about recording a few patterns out of the M8 but it’s weird how really minimal stuff can be harder to arrange quickly. Got a couple of other projects I need to finish off first so it’ll probably be later in the year.
I do have a question about latency.
What is the latency of the m8 standalone and when using USB ?
Is it possible to use a class compliant usb mixer / soundcard with the M8 ?
Thanks.
Took me about 15 minutes. Super easy.
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yeah what norb said it has the most clear setup instructions and purchase list ive ever seen. if you downlaod and install touch designer and get the ty tools before your teensy arrives thats half the battle won! then updating should take 5 seconds. The most time consuming step is when you are first setting up your audio routing.
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Portability is a great feature, but if the battery isn’t easy to replace, as one person wrote, then I wouldn’t mind having to plug an eight-year-old M8 into the wall as long as I still could. People keep comparing the M8 to the Monomachine, so it would be great if the M8 shared that kind of longevity and the internals wouldn’t be affected adversely by the prolonged use of external power.
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