First impressions as a complete tracker newbie:
Very first impressions
- Nice packaging and presentation. It felt nearly as much like a pro unboxing as the Push 3 Standalone.
- Starting up the demo song almost blasted out my eardrums. Setting the default volume at 0 dB for a brand new product with no obvious way of decreasing the volume is an bit of an odd choice. Luckily the headphones seem to be ok…
- Every other demo song would start from somewhere in the middle of the song when pressing Play. Was that where they were in the song when pressing Save, maybe?
Hardware
- The battery life is truly awesome! Good enough that I don’t even think about plugging it in sometimes because it seems to last for at least 5-6 hours.
- The form factor is neat overall. Building some muscle memory takes time but after a few days, I’m getting faster and faster. I’m 45 years old, so neuroplasticity isn’t what it used to be.
- I do wish there was some form of “more analog” form of expression on the device, like a touch strip or even something similar to those volume encoders on Game Boys on the sides. It would have been nice to be able to assign them and use them for on-the-go expressiveness like opening up a filter and things like that. I guess you can plug in a small usb-c midi controller but that defeats the purpose of the portability to me.
- The screen has a relatively poor viewing angle and interestingly seems optimized it for viewing at a slight angle from below, which makes sense on the Tracker+ maybe, but less so for the Mini since it’s in your hands and aimed straight at your face.
- Something else to consider for a future hardware iteration: shoulder/index finger buttons. This would have made it faster to work with. Also, less “mushy” feeling buttons would be nice.
Workflow
- The actual concept of tracking isn’t hard to understand. My background is with Elektron digi boxes and I’m also an old computer scientist, but I wouldn’t say I’m that technical.
- I do feel like the way each track in a pattern plays at the same speed and has the same total length is leading to a lot of redundant sequencer data. This is a part of the MPC workflow that I dislike that the Elektron workflow solves neatly by allowing each track to play back at an X-factor of the project BPM, e.g. 1/2X for half speed. This is really nice when programming a chord progression because rather than having to scroll all the way down to step 33 and then step 65 for those notes, you can program them all within a short 16-step sequence while the full pattern still runs for 128 steps. I’d love to see something similar on the Tracker because although you can get pretty fast with selecting and copying and pasting steps, it gets tedious when you need to maintain a small tweak to a track’s sequencer data by pasting that change over all the repeated bars and patterns. So, somewhat ironically, although the tracker workflow is (at least in my mind) about efficiency and speed, the Polyend pattern paradigm kind of slows me down. I’ve read up on the Dirtywave M8 and see that that’s probably where I got the impression that trackers are about this level of efficiency because it uses what’s known as “phrases”, which are essentially 16-step clips that you can chain into patterns. I guess Polyend went with a different paradigm but the tradeoff is you have to do a lot of copying and pasting.
- The Fill modes are very useful and I think you can get pretty fast on this thing by leveraging features like that when laying down the foundations of a new song. I do wish there were more than two FX slots though, especially since velocity already counts for one of them.
- I really like that it automatically restores your last project when powering it up, even if you didn’t save it before shutting it down. That’s very reassuring.
- Another workflow related issue is how EQing something requires you to stop the playback, edit EQ parameters, preview the change in isolation from the musical context you’re in, and then printing that change (whether you got it right or not) onto the sample. I find this to be a difficult workflow to wrap my head around and I find myself having to basically ignore EQ:ing because it’s too fiddly and takes too much time to get right. It’s like the SP-404 workflow in that you need to print your EQ onto the samples, but it’s actually slower than the SP because you can’t preview the EQ live in the context of the music.
Sound quality
- The demo songs are quite glitchy and weird. I would have loved to see more “radio ready” music in there too to get an idea of what’s possible. I don’t know if this is just the vibe they’re going for (trackers are perhaps more tailored to genres I’m not that familiar with).
- Anti-aliasing is on by default but there’s still a lot of aliasing, especially when pitching up a sample. Digitakt is often described as dark and slightly lofi but the Tracker is a notch more lofi to my ears.
- The reverb sounds good, but it’s not very configurable. I was really surprised that there’s no high pass filter or EQ for it other than damping. Am I the only one being concerned with not muddying up my mixes…?
- Same with the delay, it only has a LP filter. This is a disappointment because I often high pass the delay on the Syntakt so even the bass track can get some nice delay tails when sweeping up the filter.
- Same with Instruments. The fact that they lack an EQ or Base Filter is problematic to me. I see that an old request was closed, but I’m thinking that’s for the old-gen hardware so I filed a new one.
Four days in, I already have a proper song coming together and the lead is made using my own voice, which is a first for me! 
I’m now digging into the way Song Mode works. I accidentally almost erased half of the work because I assumed that pressing Delete on the cells in Song Mode would only mute those parts, but it looks like it literally erases the sequencer data if you do so. Pretty scary stuff if you ask me! I see that there’s a feature request for this too, but it’s already been closed without a clear explanation of why (other than “taking Song Mode to another direction”).
Looking forward to digging in much more over the coming week.