You could say the same about a piano - arduous hours hitting the right notes, what a silly idea.
I think that the point is that I want a groovebox that allows me to make my own music without hours of arduous pattern entry - not one that makes the music for you.
stop making samplers that can’t sample
🥲
The difference in what I’m talking about is you can sit down at a piano and just jam, assuming you know how to play the instrument. Whereas with a groove box, it’s not really like an instrument, more of a compositional tool. Compositionally speaking your free form piano jam isn’t going to be as tidy and well thought out as if you sat there and composed the piece, intentionally, over several hours. But again, it’s something you can do on the spot.
Try sitting down with a DT from a blank project and jamming something that has variation and changes over time in a meaningful way. Very difficult to do. Dataline doesn’t even do this type of work with that machine. It’s not what they’re designed for, which is fine.
Seems like you could sit down with the Play, get a jam going from blank, and make it change over time in a meaningful way. Same as you could do with a piano as long as you were willing to sacrifice some of the compositional prowess you would get composing with it in the way you mention.
I’m interested in and agree with your second paragraph. What would you think would be a middle of the road solution you would like to see that sits between a traditional groove box and the Play from a compositional standpoint.
Huh? It’s not difficult to turn knobs, change patterns, set up fills, trig conditions, sound locks, control-all, etc. etc. The DT in particular seems to have been designed with speed/ease/jam-ability in mind.
Play looks cool but we can’t give it credit for introducing the idea of “music changing over time.”
Editing later to add: My comment here was lame, I know RFJ wasn’t suggesting that Play invented music. Instead of deleting my comment I’ll leave it up here as a relic of a hasty first impression based on fear of change. There’s only going to be more technology coming our way as the years go on, so we might as well keep an open mind and avoid getting defensive.
I like Polyend’s innovation as a company and love the Tracker, but i’m not buying anymore Polyend gear until they finally deliver the vinyl for the special edition Trackers.
This has enough features to make me really interested, but the price is higher than I expected. I’m sure i’ll buy one at some point though, but it’ll be after they deliver the vinyl 
It is an interesting and valid point for sure, although also arduously programming a sequencer has value and does allow variation and change in other ways.
I guess that just as we like simple sweet spot synths/drum machines, and also complex multi function gear, it is nice to have sequencers which are simple/quick and complex/arduous.
For me, the Play is borderline too functional. I guess I’m just still trying to cross the mental gap of accepting that it’s equal parts curation and composition, but this has the wrong kind of readymade feel, at first blush. As a first reaction. Any thoughts?
I think that seems about right, composition/curation, I think it could lead to stagnation/apathy for me.
I’m not trying to give it credit with coming up with music changing over time. Your first paragraph though assumes a pattern has already been programmed by the user into the machine that sounds half way decent. I’m not trying to avoid that all together, I’ve spent years playing all these groove boxes we’d talk about on here. The Polyend approach looks different here and allows for less programming which in my situation is a good thing.
Additionally if one was to get together with other musicians in the room, something like this could be useful in that case as well.
All this is just my two cents. Use cases vary widely and I realize my desire for making music in the moment isn’t the norm.
Ouff i think this or the Hapax would be my next thing of ”villhöver” (wantneed)
Looking at the midi part of the play only so far and i think it would be a killer combo with my Torso T-1
But so would the the Hapax…both in similar price range.
Well dont ”need” more gear but it would shure be a new fun toy that would bring some spice to my neverending sequencer quest…
For sure, you make good points. I’m just paranoid about automating the humanity out of everything, especially something as intrinsically human as music. But I also definitely see the value in what Play offers and it certainly doesn’t preclude anyone from putting in the human work and making it their own (in addition to what the algorithms offer).
I agree. Its very formulaic and could lead to stagnation.
Polyend Play’s performance mode reminds me of the Pocket Operator. That’s actually really kool.
I’m excited to pair this with Poly 2 and move sample playback and sequencing out of the case. Sequencer looks super fun. I’ll never use the “make a whole beat for me” feature, but the fill functionality on the Tracker was a huge time saver, and I like stuff that can push me out of a rut. I liken these things to presets. Use 'em or don’t.
“Ultimate Groovebox” is probably a stretch, but “helluva nice sequencer with bonus sample playback” seems appropriate.
Not sure if this has been said, but autoplaying samples as you browse them would be a great feature for the Octatrack and Digitakt.
Depends how you look at curation/composition. For the vast majority of music that exists in western culture, there are limited sets of rules that we implicitly follow - be that scales, harmony, certain chord progressions, where we put the emphasis in a rhythm etc etc. For me, the Polyend is just providing a number of shortcuts to some of those rules. You can write really boring formulaic music without the Polyend and in the traditional compositional way, and you can do the same with the Polyend. Equally for both you can write great music.
All that said, I’m not sure that the Polyend Play is for me… there is too much crossover with other gear I have. Maybe in the future with some firmware updates and the price having come down a bit I’ll investigate further…
From what I’ve seen I’d agree with the sentiment that it looks like a very interesting sequencer that also happens to play back samples.
I record a lot of stuff into Logic from eurorack and various other means, so loading those into a sampler gives me a nice library of things I made myself. I currently load all those pre-prepared samples into my M8. I could live sample, but I don’t. That’s what my Octatrack is for 
The Play seems to be a nice alternative for improvised live performance to me. I’d consider it had I not just received an Oxi One with the same purpose in mind
Yeah, well put.
I’m struggling with what I think about the role of, uh, ’skills’ in music. The longer I’m into this stuff, the more I tend to think that the real skill is in knowing what you like and finding the timbres, samples, notes and chords you like. Not playing, but finding.
But would I like to be able to fluently improvise on the piano?
Maybe not so much about skills in this context, but deliberate input and deliberate choices VS hearing something generated and picking it possibly for reasons of convenience, rather than what is ‘best’.
But yeah, a lot of interesting, valid and opposing points in this thread.