Polyend Tracker Mini

[mojodrum]

I use to have a back lit tablet and this worked very well in sunlight l don’t see any other way.

[Uija]

You are right. Maybe the expectations are too high, after the hype building before NAMM.
I personally would call the isobutane videos marketing. As far as I remember, there were 2 or 3 prototypes available at the time NAMM was happening. So isobutane had one of them to play around and shoot videos with it. That doesn’t feels as if some random dude just posts videos. If I remember correctly, two of those videos were on the PET Mini website the moment it was available.

[jim]

Presumably the TM screen will perform outdoors just as good as this…
(fantastic track as well)

Polyend Tracker cosmic jungle track: Dan Apeks - 'Restoration'

[mojodrum]

This looks good but it’s not in direct sunlight my iPad also works well in shade

[tinara]

You mean like any chiptune concert or jam with artists rocking Gameboy?

Chipzel - Square Sounds Tokyo 2016

[djst]

@Uija

I personally would call the isobutane videos marketing. As far as I remember, there were 2 or 3 prototypes available at the time NAMM was happening

Sounds like you’re right, my point is just that we can’t expect that this person will be publishing educational tutorial. The purpose of the videos is to generate demand (it certainly works for me ). The tutorials and reviews will come later.

[djst]

@Amy

in PT you power on the machine, and it has the last project with all the samples loaded. Press record, instrument or note, and with the pads you are entering instruments or notes in one track… I estimate 5 seconds for this. Two buttons and the pads. Or you can press shift + home, one press up, fill and you have entered 128 notes in 10,15 seconds or less.

The workflow in the PT is awesome, intuitive and fast. But… You need to use the machine a lot.

This is good to hear. I like interfaces that you can get really fast with over time.

Somehow I think that an interface like Digitakt will always be faster than something like the Polyend Tracker Mini, based purely on the availability of the 16 trigs and the 8 endless encoders. But if the Mini can get in the ballpark and in turn offer portability, that’s still an excellent thing.

[Amy]

I’m sure that the trackers workflow will be great. Polyend has put a lot of effort in the OG tracker workflow… But you need to spend time to get fast.

I have spent countless hours with the tracker and I can say that the developers have done a great job.

[Amy]

I don’t know how they are going to do it without the pads and the jogwheel but I’m sure that they will put a lot of effort in the workflow

[snakegoat]

Delivery is in July so this is definitely the final product

[jim]

hopefully my op-z will cover the pads (and maybe map a dial for the cogwheel…if that’s even possible?)

[pidgeo]

a traditional joypad Dpad, a mini jog wheel, & 2 rows of 8 squishy og buttons would have been

[Amy]

I’m sure that they have found a solution for the missing jogwheel.

[snakegoat]

That’s what the extra plus and minus buttons are for. Looks like you can make incremental changes in fine or course amounts. Seems to be how they are overcoming the lack of a jog wheel. Definitely not as fun but I’m sure they have some tricks up there sleeve in terms of speeding up the workflow

[djst]

Do I understand it correctly that the Polyend Tracker is limited to p-locking two parameters per instrument/track, but that those two parameters can be two different parameters per step? So, on one note in a track, you could control the filter cutoff and resonance, and on another note, you could control eg bitcrush rate and playback mode (eg reverse) - but on that step the filter and cutoff would go back to the default settings for the sound?

So it’s like a more limited form of p-lock where you can only lock 2 parameters per step, but you can still choose from the entire palette of parameters on a track?

[Yashp]

@djst Correct

[djst]

Thank you for confirming. It seems a bit limiting, how do people work around it? I guess you could make copies of sounds to get more alternations, right? Are there also good LFO options available?

[schoolbabyboy]

if we wanna get real technical, you can lock volume per step as well. and yeah, copying sounds tends to be a good way to make variations like that. i was never in love with their implementation of LFOs but i may have given up on it too soon.

you can also fill noteless step, like trigless trigs, with fx to do sweeps and the like, which adds some flexibility

[djst]

@schoolbabyboy

you can also fill noteless step, like trigless trigs, with fx to do sweeps and the like, which adds some flexibility

Interesting! So what if I added a noteless step just before a note step of the same instrument, where I set the filter and resonance to certain settings, and then on the note step just after, I control the bit crush and the playback mode - would it honor all four of those parameters when playing back the sound?

[snakegoat]

Being limited by the tracker workflow is exactly what produces such interesting results.