Polyend’s Tracker is a captivating piece of drugs. It’s not for everybody, but it surely’s exhausting to argue with the worth and energy it delivers. This yr the corporate is taking that very same fundamental format, and getting in a barely extra acquainted route. The Polyend Play is a sample-based groovebox, but it surely does away with confounding tracker (lowercase “t”) workflow.
At its core Play is an eight monitor pattern sequencer, with a further eight polyphonic tracks particularly for sending MIDI to exterior gear. That means it might probably function the brains of a full studio or stage setup, whereas nonetheless dealing with the duties of a drum machine. Like the Tracker, it additionally has punch-in results for efficiency and reside remixing, in addition to a DJ-style grasp filter.
Even although the sequencer on the Play was constructed from the bottom up particularly for the system, it nonetheless retains lots of the handy options like autofill, randomization and likelihood that helped make Tracker so highly effective. Play can maintain 128 patterns, with every of the 16 tracks having 16 variations as much as 64 steps lengthy. And tracks can have impartial lengths, BPMs, playback modes and swing quantities, permitting you to create actually advanced interaction. Plus it has a track mode for arranging all of your patterns right into a completed composition.
While the format is totally totally different, Play makes use of the identical anodized aluminum construct and seems to make use of the identical delightfully clicky keys. The massive click on wheel is gone and the display is smaller, however the grid of pads has been expanded from 48 to 160 (if my math is right).
It comes loaded with 3,000 samples, although you may simply load your individual from a microSD card (a 16GB one is included). There are 35 totally different playback modes, although Polyend hasn’t revealed a full record of what these are but. And there are built-in results like reverb, delay and saturation for coloring your songs. And, identical to the Tracker, Play is powered over USB-C so you may plug into a transportable battery and make music on the go.
There are nonetheless numerous particulars we don’t know concerning the Polyend Play but, however one of many largest is the discharge date. But each time it does land (and we count on prior to later) it is going to set you again $799.