Ah, thanks for bringing the Loopop feature to my attention, @joshuaandrew. I hadn’t realized I was a part of it. Polyend had asked me to submit a piece and so I spent the better part of a day figuring out how to actually make a piece on it.
Although I had been aware of Trackers since maybe the early 2000’s or so, I had never used one because they just looked too cryptic and my first music program was MIDI Paint on an old Mac SE (with no hard drive, just two floppies—one for the system and one for files) so the piano roll goes deep.
So there is a steep learning curve for me with the tracker workflow and it didn’t help that I was using an outdated manual that didn’t yet explain a lot of the functions… that said, it was fun to try and make music on the thing and it seems to be well-designed. As I had said on the Polyend site, physically the thing is great. I love how it feels and the mechanical keys (as @andrewhuang had mentioned) are such a good move. Feels better than Push or my NI keyboard for fast button mashing. But ultimately, I suspect that the Tracker is much more suited to very grid-based music. Like, VERY grid as in drum machine, basically.
Since I don’t really make beats I wanted to see if I could blur the lines of the grid, at least. Which is what I did, mostly. I set the tracks to the max length (128 steps) and just recorded most parts in as a performance using the pads. The Tracker then used microtimings to play it back as I had recorded it. So in that way, it’s a nice MIDI looper. I couldn’t figure out how to get the MIDI input to work so I had to use the small white pads as a chromatic keyboard. They’re not the easiest to use, but I made it work. I look forward to using a keyboard next time or maybe even using eurorack into a CV to MIDI device to get back into my comfort zone. I also look forward to the implementation of scale filters for those pads so I can just mash the pads and have it all be within a chosen harmony.
But basically I just set up a bunch of samples that aren’t one-shots, but instead little 5-10 second excerpts from a bunch of unreleased stuff and works in progress and then structured it into a little sketch of a piece. If you listen closely, the piece is still very much on the grid, it’s just that the samples are what blur those lines. In the end it felt a little like reinventing the wheel just to ride a bike. I feel that if I’m to really let the Tracker shine I’m going to need to embrace the grid, to embrace the essence of the tracker workflow and not swim so much against the current.
What I found most challenging about the Tracker that is in stark contrast to my usual process is that all tracks within a pattern must share the same length. I see now that it is possible, however, to use the Performance mode to select different tracks from different patterns and that is definitely something I’m going to explore.
Because my main approach when making music (similar to yours, @taylor12k if I’m not mistaken) is to use phrases of different lengths that then phase upon one another. In this way, the composition of each part can be fairly simple, yet as the process takes over, complexity grows.
And so not being able to leverage phasing was surprisingly difficult for me. Again, I’m going to look into the Performance mode and see if songforms can be saved when using that approach. I could imagine preparing patterns of different lengths and coming up with some sort of organization that puts certain types of voices on certain tracks so that I could then just go into the Performance mode and improvise in there. That idea feels sort of like using Ableton’s grid mode for improvisation. Prepare things in advance and improvise within those constraints. But really, that’s kind of what goes down with modular processes a lot of the time. It’s not like we’re playing guitars or pianos here.
But yeah, to directly answer your questions, @taylor12k, I suspect that one would need to slow the tempo down to make the most use out of those 128 steps per pattern. Then it could get pretty long and offer more space to really breathe. And then, I wonder at what tempo the microtimings break down. As in, what is the resolution of the microtiming divisions and what does that come out to at Tracker’s slowest tempo? My piece was made leaving the unit on the default 130bpm, and at that tempo, the microtimings seemed seamless (pun intended). Granted, I would have to test the microtimings against a steady pulse to really get a feel for how fine the resolution gets.
But again, I fear that trying to make process music on a Tracker might be swimming against the current.
