you can be dawless with a laptop, too

over the last year or two, i've developed an interest in dance music production, and in particular i've come to adore music tracking software, which has its roots in the before-my-time amiga era. there's lots of tracking software that is still maintained today, with the most popular app being renoise.

i certainly recommend renoise if you are okay with its closed-source and paid license. but its tremendous power comes partially from it being essentially a daw with the tracker paradigm overlaid on top, which can become a point of frustration. (there are sometimes many different ways to accomplish the same thing, which some may find flexible, while others may feel the burden of analysis paralysis.)

wanting a more "purist" tracker experience, along with the tactility of a physical workstation, i arrived at the polyend tracker+. it's an upgraded variant of the original version released a couple years prior, and, crucially, it sports the addition of audio over usb.

included in the tracker+ are some soft synths and basic effects like reverb and delay. i'm not much of a fan of the synth engines; i find them too tedious to configure, and i haven't really gotten any great bespoke sounds from them as a result. the effects are nice - there are some non-realtime processing you can do on samples as well, but what if you want a phaser, or some other beloved dsp effect?

the tracker+'s ability to send audio (and midi!) over usb means that we can use jack to route audio and midi data to different applications. so, not only are we able to use our own dsp effects, but we can also control soft synths and route their audio as well. (i would guess that most linux users have jack installed already. fyi, i'm using the pipewire implementation.)

hosting audio plugins and routing audio with carla

carla is an audio plugin host and jack client that is an excellent supplement to the tracker+. it's able to host a variety of plugin formats, and provides an interactive graph of jack devices/applications for routing audio and midi.

this could of course be done in a daw as well. with this setup, though, the computer remains an auxiliary tool, rather than the centerpiece of the music-creation process. as i alluded earlier, i tend to see the vast offerings of tweakable tools and settings to be a burden rather than a boon.

running windows-native plugins with yabridge

in the example above, you might notice that some audio is being routed through valhalla supermassive, a free (gratis) plugin for windows and mac systems. this is made possible with yabridge, a compatibility layer that uses wine to run vst 2/3 plugins in a linux environment. i haven't yet put it through its paces, but so far it "just works," and was straightforward to get started with.

using synths you may actually like

also visible in the example screenshot is midi data being routed to the free (libre!) surge xt synthesizer, and the resulting audio is sent to the hardware mixer. the tracker+ provides 8 tracks for sequencing midi, and is able to simultaneously output midi via usb and minijack. (not pictured: the tb-303 clone i had sitting on my desk, receiving its midi via the latter.) with this setup, you're a bit limited in sequencing chords (there's a kind of "chord mode" that allows a way to send multiple notes in one step without wasting additional tracks, but you're limited to the chords and voicings provided) so take that into consideration.

conclusion - do you actually want to do this?

if you strive to be "dawless" this could be an appealing configuration. it's absolutely cheaper than buying additional hardware synths and pedals. you may like the simplicity of the polyend tracker and would prefer to keep it at the center of your setup. maybe you don't want to be "in the computer" as much when you're creating or gigging. whatever the motivation, i had fun figuring all of this out for myself, and i'll be seeing how far i get with it.

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this page was last modified at 2025-02-27 17:37:28 +0000