So far I’ve found my home with Polyend Tracker, which is kind of understandable considering my first touch with electronic music over two decades ago was trackers - way back when there was no way I could afford synthesizers and samplers, but still had a home computer with a sound card. I think it was around half a decade of first just the trackers and then having synths and sampling them to trackers, before starting to use other things day-to-day and spending less time with that particular paradigm.
Always struggled with all the other hardware samplers in some way, feeling I’m not really in control of what’s happening (eg. I still don’t think the x0x steps + parameter locks type UI is that suitable for other than very simple sample-based workflows, knowing there are many who disagree), can’t slice and manipulate the samples quickly in a way I want, et cetera. Octatrack was closest to love before, but was more of a live / loop / percussive oriented and struggled with pitched one-shot stuff and such so ended up being less than suitable for what I wanted it to be (and superb for what many others want it to be). Classic MPCs I could never gel with despite borrowing several during all the years - not even the “MPC 1000 with JJ OS” combo a lot of friends liked - and didn’t feel like trying out the MPC Live as every person I know who owns it says it feels like “DAW in a box”, which I didn’t really need.
Now, the Tracker. You can’t really do fancy granular stuff with it, nor live sampling and processing. It has 8 tracks and somewhat limited sample memory per project (more than your average unexpanded vintage sampler, but less than any modern device of the “memory costs nothing” age). It has a decent master verb, delay and limiter, but nothing super special, and no per track eq, track compression or such. It doesn’t have multiple outputs which really forces you to treat it as a single self contained music-making device. You can’t play back anything while sampling. Et cetera.
All that is forgiven at the point when one takes up the unit and can immediately get interesting things done fast, without pressing the wrong buttons, getting lost, stumbling upon things that require menu diving when they should be accessible behind their own button, or reading the manual regularly. Seeing the whole sequence at once and actually having an overview what was just recorder / programmed, being able to program all kinds of fun tricks one was routinely using with old trackers. Actually being able to play samples across the whole pitch range like with a normal sampler, with or without horrible (or cool) aliasing. And so on. It’s really a case of limitations being a good thing and enabling a super fast workflow for me (I do have complaints, but they’re so small I think there’s a good possibility they’ll eventually be addressed).
Don’t try this at home unless the paradigm is equally familiar to you, though…
