Am I the only one who thinks walking around sampling stuff then arranging it into music just doesn’t sound all that gratifying?
It seems like for the last 25 years we’ve endured artist after artist, global TED-talker, even movie character (was it Paul Kalkbrenner?) treating this method of music production like it’s something more revolutionary than the internal combustion engine.
Not trying to be salty, and I love the Polyend team… but I feel like a black sheep whenever people get excited about this method of making music.
Maybe I just haven’t heard good examples. Maybe it’s all about juxtaposition. I do love Jean Michel Jarre’s song Ethnicolor II because it creates an impossible world.
It does. And maybe for some people that makes it the ultimate tracker experience, but I’m not interested in working off a computer keyboard (else I’d just use Renoise) or carrying around external peripherals for my setup.
Alas, the quest for the perfect tracker continues.
I think they are just betting they can outproduce a 1 man shop and eat into his market share while the popularity of handheld trackers remains high. I expect M8 to still be around long after this thing is abandoned, though.
I think to really get into this you need to start a YT channel, buy an expensive camera with a blue hued lens, set it by a rippling stream and then walk to it and gently set down the sampler to record. Make sure to buy an overpriced 3.5mm mic as well. After that, record yourself banging on a log as well.
Once you do that, record yourself sending that rippling stream through various expensive hardware effects and samplers (the Microcosm is a requirement, btw). Make sure the resulting sound is placed over a 4x4 kick with a sidechain while the video slowly fades to black.
I acknowledge this may be a major investment of time and money, but I assure you after doing this you will achieve enlightenment. Please like and subscribe, thank you.
it really depends on what songs are written, if ones methodology is 100 percent innovative and the song that comes out is 100 percent shit, then of course a 100 percent non-innovative methodology that produces an song that is not shit would be better… this fact is compounded by the fact that after depending on the quality of the resulting song, it will then depend on the ear of the beholder which doesn’t have to equate to the quality of the song in any manner… leaving you with a worthless opinion that might be your own or mine.
I think depeche mode construction time again (maybe more of there stuff) had quite a bit of “found sound” sampling in it… although I agree found sound feels like a way to try to make a viral tiktok marketing gimmick more often than not these days, it can be done well though.
The read I get from these particular teasers is less about using found sounds and more “make music anywhere.” Though I think Sonicware’s Smpltrek teasers sold that fantasy better.
Wow. This thread. I thought I was negative about the possible features, but that was mostly based on my past experiences with Polyend gear being initially very limited. We’ve gone done the slide towards slamming on YouTubers. I say leave them be! I have gone to sleep many times listening to Cuckoo explain something, or sick in bed listening to Taetro livestream. I love that anyone can jam and stream their jam to me. It’s such any awesome time.
Back to the device…I’m hearing a lot of interesting sound manipulation and mangling in the clips. I hope it’s what the device is capable of doing with samples vs the actual samples sounding that way. I personally love these portable devices. I use my Yamaha qy70 and m8 more than any other device. I don’t have time to sit in a studio in front of gear to make music, so I do it in the train or on breaks. And this device is small enough that I could see taking it to shows, trails, when shopping, etc.
The Tracker is pretty good at mangling. It’s not the FX powerhouse the 404 is, nor is it quite as hands-on as the OT, but it’s fantastic at slicing, chopping, pitching, ratcheting, reversing, and even getting granular with samples. So especially if you’re into the more glitchy stuff, I guess I’d rank it somewhere just above the Blackbox.
Hopefully all that carries over into the Mini (and maybe more? I’d expect new firmware to drop for both at launch). The thing I’m really wondering now, though, is how the performance mode will translate. It really is one of the best features of the Tracker, and is a great way to mangle sounds… but is very dependent on the keypad
Yeah, I had an unpleasant experience from someone at Polyend. It was just so unnecessarily rude and aggressive. Not a great way to build a community of users. Even though I ended buying their product but I have since been very cautious of buying anything from them because if anything were to happen to the machine and I have to go back to them, well… caveat emptor!
Alright, this is long and opinionated. Apologies in advance.
I think it is both oversold and underrepresented. In my experience, having the awareness to take an impromptu sample at times is huge. At the same time, doing an entire track that way is often kind of crass and usually more novelty than art. Goes double when the person doing it is in the view-farming game.
To me, the artistry in sampling is all about perceiving a sound in a certain way, and wanting to share that perception. If applied indiscriminately, that tends to get muddied and it becomes harder to believe that the artistic ear had selected the samples. I can’t be absolute, because somewhere out there probably exists some kind of masterpiece.
A lot of the time when this comes up it’s choosing to shape some specific part of the sound with a sample. Sometimes I’ll get the idea that sampling finger snaps with a crappy mic in an untreated, barely furnished room is just the right spice. Other times it’s Daft Punk wizardry like on Homework.
Sometimes I sample for purely functional purposes if I know I can get a good sound faster by sampling than digging through endless directories. There is no real artistic expression here, but it works better than taking samples just for the sake of it. A lot of things you might think would sound right just won’t, and if you’re not hearing it artistically in the context of your track it’s just not likely to work out. At least it has never worked out for me, and I am rarely impressed when I hear others trying to do it.
I wonder if it will be capable of true resampling, along with the performance mode of the tracker that would be fantastic, and if they make an performance mode that’s recordable via the sequencer well then… stop the press!
i like what Polyend is doing even it doesn’t meet all my silly use cases 
™