I read this thread every day now. We all know how it’s gonna end, right?
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One more ghost in the tracker club?
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oh god same
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We’ll build an army of undead 
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What’s tempting me is that the Tracker actually seems a viable option for complete song creation, in a way the gear I’m on or have previously owned, haven’t fulfilled.
Examples - I love the Digitakt but it’s pattern structure is archaic. What you can do with a pattern itself is awesome, but they’re like closed universes. It’s a mind blocker for me.
The Deluge is the contrary to this - it’s an amazing piece for writing music. I feel like I could create entire symphonies on this. But its audio output is too weary. I’ve done my A / B tests on that now. Doesn’t even have to compare. It doesn’t glue the mix together. At all.
Which brings us to the Blackbox. It does just that, has fantastic headroom, filters and fx and compressor all work really well together to just cram it all together. And the sequencing and song creation, while somewhat awkward, has plenty of interesting options, similar to the Deluge. But it’s for stuff already recorded. To create something new within a Blackbox, doesn’t work great. It handles multi samples okay but not more. So you better have your material ready or a source to record from.
On to the Toraiz SP-16, then. Sounds fantastic. A joy to work with. But man, does it suck at chromatic content, polyphony and stuff like that. It’s great for what it’s for but not for working out original content on the machine itself, if your idea of original content is new bass lines, chords, leads and stuff.
I could go on. But what appeals to me with the Tracker is this -
It has a song structure that goes beyond the idea of just stringing patterns together. Like the Blackbox and the Deluge. If a pattern is a collection of ideas, the way you blend these together across borders is where it becomes interesting.
It seems to sounds great. EQ, compression, fx all add to a mix that sounds well glued together with plenty of space for elements to breathe and find their place.
It handles samples really well, meaning I can write harmonic content on this one as well, not just work with existing material but create new, too. Bass lines, pads, chords, melodies. Stuff like that.
I don’t care about the sample limit (120 seconds is the world to me), eight tracks, limited midi sequencing and stuff like that.
I just want a goddam song writing tool that gets the essentials right. There’s no box out there that really embraces the holistic view of all this. Or my holistic idea of this, that is 
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There are a few things that I really miss on the Tracker:
i would like to use more than 5 midi cc over a full project.
I would like to use LFOs that don’t reset at all, so I can modulate stuff longer than a pattern length.
I would like to have some more fx types, like changing the decay of an envelope per step etc.
While I love to work with the interface, the sample editor etc, the possibilities to play with the samples is superior on the digitakt to the tracker. I like to vary on the decay of a hihat sample to bring life into the hihats. I like to play around with the envelope amount of a filter per step, to make stuff more interesting. This is currently not possible, that bringt me to a point, where the stuff is way more static then I like it to be.
I am on my quest to find solutions for it, but currently I am running against walls already. Because, when I fix those needs with just more samples, I run out of memory quite fast.
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That would be great. There are a lot of parameters (bit depth ?) that would be great to modulate
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Oh, man. I just assumed such stuff could be done. No way I’m going for this now, then. While I don’t necessarily think p-locks are God’s gift to the electronic musician, breathing some life into exactly what you just said - hats, cymbals, snare decay - does a world of difference.
On the other hand, Blackbox can’t do it. I’m okay with that on the Box.
Okay, so after a few seconds of losing interest, I’m back being interested again
what is the deal with all these cool samplers coming out in 2020 without stereo samples?
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Checking out the song mode in detail, my takeaway from it is that it’s a clever and fluent way to create pattern mutes and quick variations on existing patterns. But each section in the song view still seems to be locked to a specific pattern, with no independance of tracks running in parallell. A bit like the Toraiz does it. Not bad, but not for me. I’m in the Blackbox / Deluge / MC X0X camp when it comes to song writing.
Gas is now on moderate levels only. I repeat, gas is moderate only. Condition is critical but stable. For now.
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it all started 11 or 12 years ago, NI told the world that maschine was the future and that in that future you didn’t need proper midi or proper sampling capabilities and the world believed them… fast forward to the present and in spite of NI laughing that notion off all the way to the bank as well as leaving such notions behind everybody else in the universe thinking futuristically is defining the future by what they can take out/ omit… whether it’s screens, sample ram, project ram, sampling itself, stereo sampling etc… yeah some call me salty but really I’m just fish&chips.
I agree with you. I have the same problem: cannot rename files in file transfer mode. In addition: I can generate a new folder in file transfer mode but cannot rename this either so that it just stays “new folder”.
I know it’s not quite the same, but you can start out with a long decay and use the fade command to shorten it on any step - or use several instruments with the same sample and different decays and then use the ‘i’ FX as a random instrument selector to vary the decay (or combine the hats into one sample and use random slices). Of course the Digitakt method is preferable - much easier and more flexible, but it’s another example of how solutions can be found in the existing toolkit, in a way that can sometimes open up new ideas.
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This is a great point and something that’s annoyed me in the past, too - until recently, if you wanted a hardware sampler you either had to look to the used market or accept an inconvenience . For a while my main two samplers were the Octatrack (no polyphony) and the SP-404 (no polyphony, no chromatic playback). Both great at what they do, and both with unique selling points, but both also subsets of the sampler model. Things have improved now - the MPC range has bought back the feature set of the classic rack/pad sampler with modern additions, the Blackbox and MC-707 are similarly flexible, and while I haven’t tried the Deluge, that also sounds very capable. But there was a long period of trying to reinvent the sampler by subtraction or specialisation - no doubt a reaction to the abilities of the DAW, but still frustrating considering the development of synth features at the same time.
As I’ve no doubt said somewhere above, the Tracker doesn’t bug me in this regard because although it’s obviously founded on the idea of sampling, it’s actually the tracker paradigm that’s at the core of its design and workflow, which involves compromises. - and there are also now alternatives that do it all. We might finally be entering a new golden age of samplers, so my goal is to get in and try out as many as possible before they go out of fashion again.
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To be fair, today’s samplers might lack a lot in terms of features, but what they decide to keep, they usually do a lot better than what went before them. There’s an instrument or two out there that do its thing so well, you’re essentially getting master quality renders from it directly from the machine. I’d rather take that holistic view on music production than cram lots of stuff into these boxes.
Now, if anyone of these devs out there could just pick up their goddam phone and ask me what my idea of such a holistic view would be … 
That’s usually how trackers work; one pattern at a time with all tracks playing from that pattern. There are some notable exceptions, like Buzz and SunVox.
The arguable benefit is that you can see all your tracks side by side in the pattern, so have a good overview of what’s going on.
For hihats I tend to go with loading the same sample a lot of time, setting them all to different decays, and place them in a track. I throw in a little volume randomization. Then I sample it into a single sample and chop it up. Now I can use the random note (or random slice) fx to choose a hit.
That’s good for hihats, but does not help me with filter (envelope amount) automation, as I would have to sample (and slice) a lot of notes with a lot variations to get the result I want.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe a find a way to migrate what I want more to want the tracker throws at me. But that needs time, as I am quite used to how I approach stuff.
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Yeah, I get that. It makes total sense, it’s no fault on the Tracker approach, it’s my brain that wants something else.
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me too, can never have enough beat machines…
and people wonder why mpcs have held their value so well and why so many users have several of them…
but yeah I’m all in I’ll give any dev a try no matter who it is…
Me too actually. That’s why I said arguable benefit. It is really nice to be able to see all tracks while programming, particularly for drums, but really limiting that it is the same with playback.
If they could implement something where it was possible to select track x from pattern y in the song mode, and deal with different pattern lengths, that would make Tracker much more appealing and fun for polyrythmic stuff too. But I suspect it would be diverging too far from the typical tracker logic to implement easily.
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