Stupid instagram doesn’t allow external user to watch this video, i am always interested into anything tagged as breakcore, and plus I love Machinedrum
Just received a MK3 unit, I haven’t compared to a MK2 unit, though there is definitely nothing to worry about in terms of casing, the top is aluminum and the sides and bottom are plastic, though with a high quality rubbery finish, though not the kind that is going wear if you rub it if that makes sense. Overall build quality is high, only weak point is the pads which feel a bit cheap / membraney compared to the mechanical keys, though overall I’m very impressed.
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Have a Tracker rev 1 here. Initial updates were promising, but seeing them ignore many good (glide in instrument section for example) ideas on GitHub and instead spending time implementing horizontal mode is taking the piss.
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Frankly i really love performance mode. Pattern play mode is my favorite effect i just spam the crap out of it…
Here tracker ks only used as a sequencer for Pulsar and Nord Lead 2
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Did the microtonal scales ever come to fruition? I know that there are microtonal FX but it would be lovely to have microtonal scales across the pads.
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(Not my video)
Polyend Tracker using only Amiga tracker sample discs from the 80s as sound sources:
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I really liked the review done by Venus Theory recently showing different approaches on the Polyend Tracker (going further than music excel and jungle 
)
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waiting for some superbooth info from polyend! hopefully they showcase a bit of what’s coming for the next firmware !
Enjoyed.
Looks like new devices and anything beyond the latest firmware is being held back til next year:
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Man Polyend are such a nice company, shining a light on unknown artists and paying customers rather than just promoting big names and influencers, far more interesting than just licking bum. Other companies should take note IMHO.
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Same impression I had since the very first time I visited their website…
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New little jam online with the Erica Bassline and Tracker 
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Another little track. I have neglected learning performance tricks with it so far, so my videos won’t get more interesting soon. But I love how straight forward songmode is
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With all the confusion about m1-mk3… Does the dust cover from the polyend website fit on all versions?
A quit long-ish feedback/review from a beginner perspective
TL;DR: I like alot the Polyend Tracker, the workflow do not bother me as I never really digged into other workflows “all is new, all is beautiful”. I still have trouble to express melodic and harmonic ideas due to the bias coming from instruments like piano and guitar ; I really love creating drums patterns and track on it because my rythm sucks. I still have to discover if mangling sample and digging for them is really where I feel comfortable. All said, I am happy falling into this rabbit hole with a companion having a nice balance between easy to access and depth to dig further. Got the Tracker just before 1.4 firmware and been on it since it’s out.
Summary
Some context
I am no musician by trade or by talent I played various instrument at a beginner level here and there during the last 20y (guitar and piano), we do not want to let me play at our parties. It is been one year that the itch to try to create music really began to scratch. I fell into the Youtube algorithm grave digging for hours and hours on machines I did not know nothing about. Finally after being almost convinced that I was going to pull the trigger on the MPC One, a voice in my head pushed to try the Polyend Tracker before. Just a feeling that maybe finger drumming was not the best means to an end when you have the sense of rythm of a salmon. You know the guy always clapping after or before eveyrone at concert, nice to meet you. And I maybe also am overly affected by option paralysis for everything, if I believe my search and youtube history.
Before taking the plunge, I have been playing with LMMS, Ardour, VCVRack and Hydrogen.
Discovering the Tracker and sampling
When you are a beginner and began to haunt forums looking for feedback, reviews and opinions, you will read that mystical phrase “Limitations will drive my creativity”. Yep, for a beginner, you will first be looking for your creativity and will not be able to distinguish the limitations of your machine, yours and what you simply do not know. After a soup of Youtube Videos, forum digging, too many jungle jam, I decided that I will try some stuffs. The interface and UI was intuitive and mostly you just need to read the text written either on the buttons you push or the top bar. Honestly, when everyone speaks about the tracker interface (either they love or hate it), for a beginner like me it was discovering what how not having your own sample library is reducing until you learn how to record on the fly samples, began to hunt the web and finally have too much Gb of kick,s hit hats, bleeps and blops on your hard drive.
I was not expecting that my main struggle would be the sampler part of the Tracker. When looking after which machine to buy, you realize than MPC and MC-707/101 coming with synth engines in fact allow to presets of sounds that your ears know for years and years of exposition to them. This is conforting for a beginner. Here even with the super nice projects and samples included by various artists (even some I know and like like The Flashbulb/Benn Jordan and Stazma/Repeat Eater), I felt lost. Having to discover an interface, a workflow and a lot of sounds that I am not used to it (besides the TR-X0X samples thanks to Stazma and its Concrete Collage samples put in the Tracker).
Forget about harmony and melody, make noise
The parts I really still struggle until right now stay my inability to find samples (and or create wavetable/granular sounds) and ways to use them to leverage the little of music theory I know. With the added constraint to make that sounds good. One major brain freeze I have is to connect the pitch of a sample with the note name showed in the Tracker. I still do not know if I can change this on a Instrument basis. Example : I have a sample A4 note from my piano and I want the A4 note in the Tracker to be the value of the sample and not being C5 (the default value of a sample). I also wish to have multi-layer samples for one Instrument because the note stretching degraded the sample too fast. The workaround of having the same sample pitched to various octaves and importing each as separate instrument is a way to doing it or having one sample of the various ptich, beat slicing it with the Tune effect is also another solution. Having nothing else that the Tracker makes me hate seeing the Chord Midi effect without being able to use it.
Drums, drums and drums
I find myself creating drums patterns, I would never been able to play in real life and it is amazing for me. Honestly I always struggle to keep a beat straight or keep track of one for a longer time than a few measures and the Tracker allowing me to create rhythms impossible to play for me, let me also learn to have a better feeling about the pulse. It really opened my ears and brain about something that was feeling totally alien to me. Probably a lot of other machines would have made me realize that I am not a broken person with a deep deficiency in rhythm.
Performing or creating a song
Having the choice to alternate promptly between Song and Performance mode and do whatever you want make you… do whatever you want I managed to create whole songs after a few weeks that I was confident to share with some selected friends and at the same time loosing myself in pseudo-performance during whole evenings. The Tracker provided me the feeling that I can do something with it, something concrete and messy but something real.
This is the End
After struggling the first week with the Tracker, noodling the followings ones and finally beginning to find my way with it, I was going back to look at Youtube videos about other gears (TR6S/8S and MC1010/707 mostly) and instead of asking myself “I should have choosen X or Y, it would have been easier”, I began to say to myself “How can I do that on the Tracker ?”. Looking at Jeff Mills performance on the 909 and Capitain Pikant’s break up of it : “Can I do that with the Tracker ? How can I try to do a similar performance ?”. The main change in paradigm is that I do not look at MPC videos and feels like I made the wrong choice (if even you can call that wrong). I just do look at them and do not feel the urge to buy one.
I decided for the next four months to simply stick with the Tracker. Dig into it and seems which part of me will get out, how I can use it to express myself and if I really am going to feel real limitations. The only thing that I want to add to the Tracker is a MicroMonsta 2 to be able to use the Midi Chord with a variety of sound design.
I also want to buy a Korg Wavestate in six months but I have no idea how it can be a good collaboration with the Tracker and even if the matching will pair. I just love the cinematic score music the Wavestate can do but … that is for another too long post somewhere else in the internet.
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Thank you! Keep em coming
Has there ever been a definitive yes/no to being able to monitor live while sampling and playing the tracker simultaneously via a firmware update? Was just building a kit resampling iOS FAC Drumkit sounds into the Tracker and after I got the BD and SN, I built a basic loop for other perc to synthesize - but the Tracker clearly won’t let you do such a simple task as I described. Such a buzzkill. Last I checked this was 2021. Lol
I found this but no answer or reply from PE. https://github.com/polyend/TrackerIssues/issues/449
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