No products in the cart.

Loading...
What’s up
Back

Scene: Grillo – Jenga Tears

"Using the Polyend Tracker, I can easily create choppy, linear drumming style complex sequences on a single track and I get great visual feedback of exactly how the sequence is going to play out."

“I started making music on trackers many years ago and then moved on to other, more linear daw style apps over time, so when I heard about the Polyend Tracker I felt an intense pang of nostalgia for that world and I knew I had to get it. I plan to use it for sketching ideas and making beats while I’m on the couch.

I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do work without a full qwerty keyboard, especially at first, but the UI is intuitive and very well thought out and I was able to write and make edits quickly and efficiently, this thing is really a joy to use. There’s plenty of memory for my needs, and it’s straightforward to get creative with the sampling in a way that feels significantly different than my Akai MPC and Roland sp units. On the Tracker, I can easily create choppy, linear drumming style complex sequences on a single track and I get great visual feedback of exactly how the sequence is going to play out.”

Download

Get the project of Grillo – Jenga Tears.

Description

“This is my first Tracker track so I am still trying to find my way around the interface and the engine and I surely haven’t used almost any of the advanced features but I’m quite happy with it. If you poke around the project please bear my newness in mind, it’s like bad code, it works but there are definitely some areas that could be tightened up and some unused sample assets from earlier drafts are still there.
I know that I’m not going to use breakbeat slicing and resequencing in my music, it’s just not my aesthetic, but the principle of the technique is very interesting to me, I think you can apply the same idea to a phrase played on any instrument and reshape it into a new, original riff or progression that you wouldn’t have thought of in a linear way. I used this on the bassline and the trumpet riff but I definitely want to experiment more with this approach in the future.

While I was compiling samples to feed my Tracker I stumbled into a short clip from an anime posted on Twitter that I found super interesting: in it, some schoolgirls are playing a traditional Japanese game that looks kinda like Jenga but with a mallet and a doll made of wooden pieces, I know I am butchering this and saying something really dumb but I know absolutely nothing about the show or the game, but what I know is that the clip had amazing sound design and I stole some wooden hits and vocalizations to use as accents in my track.

After the first sketch of a beat, I came up with the idea of having the pitched-down chord sample and built a B section out of it in a couple of minutes. I think I’m going to export the stems and mix them a bit, it’s always tricky to plan and execute fluid transitions between different parts of a track using patterns but I really like the overall sound I’m getting from the Tracker, it’s very punchy and I want to keep that feel.”

Grillo

“My name is Matteo Grilli. I was born in a small town in Le Marche, Italy, and I have been making weird abstract beats as Grillo since for a long time. I also do sound design, sound editing and mixing for videos, games and creative projects at bleeoop.com

During spring 2020 I built Quarantine Destruction Loops: an audiovisual project designed to help people with their meditation practices and relaxation techniques during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, it lives on Twitter.”

Bandcamp

Instagram