With all the people waiting for M8 pre-orders and running headless setups on Teensy, I keep wondering what it would be like if someone could get M8 running on the Polyend… 
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My review of the Nerdseq
Meanwhile, producers such as Dex and Jonesey broke into the Top 40 with Amiga-made tracks like their souped-up remix of Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness, and even caught flak from the music establishment for daring to eschew the pricier Apple computers most professionals used at the time.
But the Amiga’s powerful bass sound and punchy, unique grooves were hard to imitate. Unlike music software such as Cubase or Logic Pro, which reads from left to right, Amiga’s equivalents cascaded from top to bottom in a lo-fi graphical waterfall of bits and bytes. “Because only eight things can play at once at any given time, it makes you work harder,” says King. “You need to go into the actual soundwave.”
This hyper-granular approach allowed King to be “forensic right down to the 1,000th of a second” in a way that would take “10 times as long” with Cubase. “I was obsessed with having everything perfectly matching and going at the same time,” he says – still a painstaking task considering the software only showed numbers passing by, rather than labelled blocks of drums and basslines that could be shuffled about more easily.
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Hardware trackers have seen a revival in the 2022, with the Polyend Tracker, the Dirtwave M8, and the already existing Nerdseq. Do you think we will continue seeing new trackers in 2023? Here is a new tracker for Monome Norns.
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I had a dream that Elektron made a new device with a linear sequencer similar to the one on the MPC Live II but you could plock the steps like it was a tracker.
Never got them, even back in Atari ST days. Nothing personal, same as with DAWs I get and those I don’t.
I think trackers are the way forward for anyone who wants a portable device with daw power in the future. The tracker can take less cpu to run while still being exceptionally powerful.
Just my opinion but I won’t be surprised to see a 16 -24 channel tracker soon that has immense sampling capabilities and effects.
In other words I believe it will be easier to have renoise in a handheld box compared to ableton.
For me I just use a laptop but I do love my m8.
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Yes. I agree. And if you see Song Mode from the Octatrack or Syntak, they have a lot of things similar to trackers. Maybe it shouldn’t be so hard to make a machine like this for Elektron.
During early 2000s I was obsessed with the idea of “making music ANYWHERE”. I don’t remember how but somehow I stumbled upon LSDJ, somehow ordered a rewritable cart and cart writer from god knows where, it arrived in 4 weeks, got stuck in customs, the cart writer was using serial port and very unstable, i couldn’t buy the original rom (buying anythingonline wasn’t really a thing back then, and i didn’t even have my own credit card) so I lurked around yahoo discussion group of LSDJ and luckily was able to find people who can send me the full rom (hell, they were even kind enough to send any new updates to me).
There was very limited information besides the yahoo group but somehow I was able to make it work. I remember I was sooooo fast using it and I was constantly coming up with new tricks, and trying to get around dithering to import clean 4-bit wave files I ripped from Hammerhead and converted in Sound Forge.
Oddly, after a couple of years I was somehow drawn away to DAW land with Fruity Loops and a very early version of Ableton Live (i think it was pre-4). I always tried to get back to it with Milky or Renoise but I guess I felt lazy.
Now as a grown up that has to pay the bills, I have a very limited budget that I already exhausted with a couple of Elektron devices throughout the years, so M8 is very much out of scope for me (especially with the crazy VAT).
Fast forward to literally TODAY and I found out that it’s possible to run Little Piggy Tracker on even cheap handheld retro-consoles with custom firmwares. Luckily I had one that I bought for around £25 a couple of years back that can run it. Configuring it was a nightmare (keymapping was a mess) but I managed to make it work! I was even able to “autorun” LGPT on launch and poweroff the device when I quit, to make it feel like a more “dedicated” device (and cure my GAS against M8 a bit). Now gathering all my samples from my DT to put them into this little guy. LGPT also supports sf2 files so creating my own “chains” in sf2 format is also a possibility. (I always liked soundfonts)
Next step? Dunno. I already have a Teensy 4.1 so maybe I can try to go to the route of getting a Gameboy Zero, slap Teensy inside and run m8headless as a “budget” solution. Let’s see if I’ll have the time and energy to do it. But first, perhaps a house EP purely made on LGPT.
Oh, and even though I have very little C++ knowledge, I’ll try to add a masterbus compressor to LGPT (by of course, using other people’s CC0 code, heheh). Looks far from possible, but I’ll try.
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I don’t have a tracker story as I’ve never used one. From the looks of it I would hate it. It looks like writing a song in MS Excel.
M8 was my first. Then I tried Polyend Tracker which was very mediocre to me after using M8. And then I got the NerdSeq which is for eurorack and it’s a lot of fun. M8 is the king for hardware trackers imo.
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You not tempted to try m8 headless on your teensy with a game controller / pc ? Piece of piss to set up
i ordered a proper microsd, i’ll try that that when it arrives!
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I’m always confused about why running m8 headless is a thing. Surely it would be similarly easy for it to be ported as a standalone application?
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I’m pretty sure my DAWs sequencer isn’t using any noticeable amount of CPU.
I’m pretty sure you don’t get what I was saying.
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M8 software version without the headless USB would be amazing
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Not my story but the story of someone with a rich history of trackers:
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I started in 1998 when I was 16 and dreamed of pursuing music. However, at that time, Russia, due to the recently fallen Iron Curtain and its overall detachment from the world, lacked opportunities to access or properly disseminate information about technologies. I couldn’t afford any hardware synthesizers or equipment at all since the economy was still in a very poor state, and I had neither money nor resources. So, my friend somehow brought me a FastTracker on a regular floppy disk, copied from an unknown source. There was also a manual with a machine translation into Russian, which was extremely confusing because I didn’t even know the basic terms. The peculiarities of technical English were interpreted by the translator as buses and cats. While my peers were using drugs, I tried to figure out how to start making music through trial and error. Since I didn’t have the opportunity to ask anyone about it, I simply listened and tried to reproduce everything I could gather in my music library. After a couple of years, I finally got access to the internet, and that’s when I met some acquaintances with whom we exchanged modules and knowledge as much as we could. However, this lasted for a short time because my 486 DX2 computer broke down, and the FastTracker refused to work on the new computer. I had to rely on Fruity Loops for several years, which turned out to be the least productive period in my creative journey. In the end, in 2006, I stumbled upon Renoise, and it breathed new life into my music and rekindled a great interest in it. Gradually, I completely transitioned to Renoise and eventually purchased a license. Despite hearing many comments about trackers being outdated, as my personal experience shows, they are incredibly creative tools, and I will never give them up, despite the relatively slow development process. I really appreciate the trend that over the past few years, there has been a renaissance of this concept, and so many amazing new instruments have emerged within the realm of this cherished concept.
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