My Tracker arrived yesterday. I’ve only just dipped into it for a couple hours, but I’m already head over heels. Pure inspiration in a box. Even at this early stage, I already feel 100% vindicated in selling my Digitakt to fund the Tracker. I’m going to use it way more, and most importantly, make actual songs / finished tracks with it (that’s just me; I’m sure others will prefer DT, or find both useful side-by-side).
Going from sampling my modular to immediately doing cool compositional things with those samples feels lightning quick and painless. I’ve gotten promising results from sampling Furthrrrr Generator as well as Arbhar with its built-in mic. Interested in exploring the MIDI side of things soon via my Poly 2.
I’ve never used a tracker before (aside from a few tentative steps into Renoise which led nowhere), so that might be part of this being so revelatory for me, but I’m taking to it like a fish in water. For decades I thought something was wrong with me because I just never really clicked with the piano roll paradigm and the hundreds of things that have emerged from that, and this feels way better to me. Even something simple like scrolling down rather than scrolling right feels intuitive and cozy to my brain.
I’m powering it off of my Ravpower 60W / 20,000 mah battery bank bought on sale for $40, and its charge indicator wasn’t fazed at all by the time I spent with it. Recommended accessory just to untie yourself from power outlets.
Just as Elektron sequencers became rightfully famous for “parameter locking” features, I suspect the “Fill” section of Tracker is going to emerge as the superstar of the show here. It’s fantastically deep and easy to use.
No surprise to anyone that the biggest limitation is the 2 FX lanes per track. I’m still figuring out how much of a limitation it will end up being for me, but at least so far, it’s an interesting way of working that I’m not opposed to. This sounds like a post hoc excuse (and maybe it is), but in a way the 2 FX lanes limitation makes me go about composing and designing, and then stop myself from digging deeper into one step endlessly at the expense of the track as a whole getting completed (or, forest for the trees, as the saying goes). Switching FX type per step on a single lane is effortless, so that helps at least. It ends up turning into a bit of a puzzle, like Sudoku for music production. At least for now, I’m embracing it and seeing where it leads.
