Curiously, as a aperson who have a clear tendance of stacking dozens of tracks over dozens of tracks when working in daws, I’m often going around 6-7 in the M8…Go figure… 
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Presumably that’s because you can squeeze in lots of different drums in one track. But in the end I find that I most of the time want to give each drum sound a slightly different mixing treatment once multitracked into the DAW and that’s where having more tracks is convenient because it saves me some time having to manually/surgically separate sample trigs in one audio stem into separate parallel tracks.
In the end, that works and isn’t a tremendous task by any means - when doing Digitakt productions, that’s what I do and it works. It’s just that if I have a choice, I’d rather go with 16 tracks and keep snares, kicks, hats, percs on separate tracks. 
I suspect it’s a UI design decision. 16 tracks on a screen that small with so few buttons is going to be difficult to manage. There may also be HW constraints – I believe that RAM is the bottleneck right now.
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Just take a look at track written by Ess Mattisson – 1 track, only FM synth:
Or this beautiful track written by laamaa:
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Yeah I know you can cram in so much in one track. My point is more about competence and convenience. Those wizards somehow have ears where everything sounds great without processing. I know that when I cram stuff together, I want to tweak eq later and fix things I missed in the creative process. Hence why I’d prefer more tracks to work with: I’m not as competent as they are.
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Easiest way to achieve this is to use multiple tracks for your drums, then render it down to a single loop. You might even get some cool ideas by mangling said loop for fills and such in the current or future projects.
I also do this for chords sometimes. I’ll just leave the top 2-3 rows of the song full of stuff to render, and write the actual song a few lines further down. This way you can always make changes to your previously rendered chords or drumloops. And as a bonus you can easily render out separate drum parts at the end.
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I wouldn’t worry about the number of tracks; when you start working, restrictions are more of a plus for creativity. The concept of instruments is very convenient. For example, you have a kick drum and a bass. You select the “Trig envelope” type of envelope on the bass modulation page and select there the kick drum instrument from which this envelope will be triggered and the parameter it will affect, for example, volume or filter cutoff (or any other synth parameter) – voila, the side chain is ready. And you no longer have to worry about the bass drowning out the kick. Whenever a kick sounds, the bass will decrease in volume. There are a lot of such things. And after buying the M8, I fell in love with working with samples. I especially like slicing loops. For example, you load a drums loop, select the number of slices into the samplers, and you’re done - M8 will distribute the slices by notes and you can modify the loop as you want, even run it upside down and backwards, add all sorts of randomizers, etc. A sample can be sliced into 128 slices, which makes it possible, for example, to fill a sample chain with a note-sampled synthesizer and use it as a real hardware synth. I made myself my favorite presets with a4, virus and prophet - it turns out that my oscillator is sample, and the filter and envelopes are from m8.
M8 does a lot of work for you. For example, you do not need to enter the instrument number every time. M8 will substitute it automatically based on which one you used before. Or, for example, you do a transposition of a phrase from chain view on one track by +5, for example, then when you go to a phrase of another track and try to transpose it, it will automatically substitute +5 for you, assuming that you want to transpose the entire song. Another example – you play with cutoff or any other synth parameter on instrument page and decide to add parameter lock to the sequencer – you need to just press Edit btn on FX row and M8 will automatically populate it with CUT parameter…
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Appreciate the input @Norb and @Uturunku, thanks. If the resampling and re-resampling of patterns across multiple tracks is straightforward, then that sounds like a doable workflow indeed.
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do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior quick-render
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Another WIP )
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I was just about to mention the quick render. It’s the easiest resampling that I’ve come across!
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Talking about reverb, what is exactly the reverb modulation?
I like to abuse it, it can give really nice sounds. And us actually almost mandatory ^^
So yeah, what’s the signal flow here exactly?
Love it!
just fired up model 02, new text got me feeling like sid!
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That’s one of the reasons I didn’t got it. I don’t know but it feels weird.
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I know quantitatively it’s an improvement, because dirtywave is physics driven, so I’m trying to give it a minute to acclimate to the improvement. my lizard brain just really gets off on the little pixilated DOS characters, this hebrew hieroglyphics is stretching out my gd eyeballs
I’m with you on this, I don’t tend to like having my drums bounced down to 1 or 2 channels if thinking ahead to bouncing out stems for mixdowns. But a workaround that’s actually very feasible for me is having a separate drum group ‘island’ using tracks 1-6 (which is plenty for me tbh) using chains and phrases D0 upwards and getting really into my nitty gritty of sequencing and arranging up there. Once I’ve got my drums sounding nice I’ll render them out either fully or a couple separate groups and use tracks 1&2 for playback and build the rest of my song across the rest of the tracks. If I wanna go back and make some tweaks to the drums it’s not that difficult to just render out tracks 3-8 and pop them in track 7or8 of the drum island. When the song is finished I render the stems out separately of the main arrangement and the drums, and so some extra post processing on individual drum channels in a DAW. Sounds convoluted, but it’s not massively tbh though I’d always welcome more tracks haha
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Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean you’ve recorded a sample with one of the synths, wherein you go through the scales? 
I mean the following: if I have a hardware synth (or vst), I can record it note by note using 1010music Tangerine or SampleRobot or just DAW from C1 to C8, than combine this samples in a sample chain (using Digichain web app or other software). After that I can just load this sample chain in a sampler instrument, slice it using parameter from instrument page (just set number of slices) and thats it. Slices will be automatically assigned to the notes starting from C1 and you will be able to play chromatically or using scales like this is internal synth. Add filter, effects, envelopes, lfos and so on. Even more – as M8 has internal input, you can connect external synth directly to M8 and make this auto sampling directly to M8 without additional software. You just need set up a project.
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another M8 writer’s block goldmine:
shift selection
(highlight selection, edit+up or down)
same thing as elektron FUNC+ left or right to shift trigs. but on M8 you can select just one area and just shift that selection, bottom wraps to top. works on FX columns too
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Love this one. You can play the selection as a loop too. Wish the Elektrons had this.
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