Polyend Founder Piotr Raczyński: Designing Hardware to Inspire

This interview was originally posted in German on amazona.de and has been translated to English.

DelayDude:
Hi Piotr, great to meet you. I hope you’re having a good time here at SuperBooth.

Piotr:
Great to meet you too. Superbooth is always intense, but in the best possible way. It is one of

the few shows where you can meet engineers, musicians, artists, synth nerds and complete maniacs in the same place. That’s exactly our kind of environment.

DelayDude:
You didn’t originally start out as a businessman, but primarily as a musician and sound experimentalist. What musical experiences—or frustrations—from your own past ultimately served as the catalyst for founding Polyend? And which of those original ideas can still be found in your devices today?

Piotr:
I think the main frustration was that many electronic instruments felt like they were designed more around technology than around the moment of making music.

I was always interested in rhythm, repetition, accidents, machines, physical interaction. But I often felt that the tools either gave you too much abstraction or too little control. You were looking at a screen, clicking around, thinking like an editor instead of playing like a musician.

Polyend started from a very simple idea: hardware should help you stay in the musical moment. It should give you structure, but not kill intuition. It should be deep, but still invite you to touch it immediately.

That idea is still in everything we do. Tracker (the easiest tracker to work with), Play (the most playable groove box there is), Seq (intuitive and hands-on midi sequencer), now Endless (the most enjoyable open source platform possible) and Drums (the most playable yet complex drum machine). They are all different, but they come from the same place: make machines that encourage exploration, not just operation.

DelayDude:
Early on, Polyend consciously positioned itself against the classic “DAW-first” approach, opting instead for performance-oriented hardware workflows. This was a bold decision, particularly with devices like the Polyend Tracker. Why do you believe the tracker workflow holds such strong relevance again today—especially in an era of seemingly limitless software possibilities?

Piotr:
A DAW is incredibly powerful, of course. But sometimes it gives you so many choices that the musical idea disappears before you even commit to it. With a tracker, the limitation is part of the strength. You have to be focused. You have to be deliberate. The workflow pushes you to make decisions instead of endlessly postponing them.

It is also a completely different way of thinking about music. Many people are used to a horizontal timeline, where music is arranged from left to right. A tracker is vertical, pattern-based, very direct. You see notes, steps, samples, values. It may look almost primitive at first, but that is exactly why it can lead to different results.

And I think that is why people are rediscovering trackers today. Not because of nostalgia. Because a different workflow gives you different music. Trackers are fast, precise and surprisingly expressive once you understand the logic.

DelayDude:
With the Polyend Play, it’s striking just how deeply generative composition approaches have been integrated—features like randomization, fill-mechanics, and performance-based pattern manipulation make it feel almost like an instrument for controlled chance.

How do you go about developing such creative features at Polyend? Do they tend to emerge from practical musical experimentation in the studio, or from technical research conducted within the team?

Piotr:
Usually both, but it almost always starts with a musical problem.

We do not sit down and say: “Let’s add a generative feature because generative music is fashionable.” It is more like: “How can we make a pattern feel alive without forcing the user to manually program every tiny variation?”

A lot of these ideas come from using the machines ourselves, from watching artists use them, and from very practical studio frustration. You make a nice loop, then after a minute it becomes boring. So the question is: how do you give the musician controlled instability? How do you allow surprise, but still let the person feel responsible for the result?

DelayDude:
Many users describe Polyend devices as being particularly “musical,” despite their technological complexity. During the development process, how do you manage to strike a balance between deep functionality and immediate creative accessibility? Do you have any internal principles or design guidelines regarding human interface and workflow?

Piotr:
One of our rules is that the first interaction should make sense without explanation.

Of course, a deep instrument will always have advanced functions. But the basic idea must be clear. You should be able to touch something, hear a result and understand the relationship.

We also try to avoid hiding the core experience behind too many layers. If something is important for playing, it should be visible or very close to the surface. If the user needs a manual before making the first sound, something is wrong.

Another principle is that complexity should be playable. We are not against deep features. We love deep features. But they should not feel like accounting. They should feel like performance. And this is the hardest task of them all. This is what took us a lot of interactions when designing Drums.

DelayDude:
With the Polyend Medusa, you created an instrument that weaves sequencing, performance, and sound design together in an unusually tight-knit way.

Looking back: What were the most difficult technical or conceptual challenges you faced during its development? And are there any features that, from today’s perspective, might have actually been ahead of their time?

Piotr:
Medusa was a very ambitious instrument. Maybe too ambitious in some ways, but I mean that with affection.

It actually started quite simply. Dreadbox asked us if we could add a regular sequencer to one of their synth concepts. But because we are Polyend, and because we are probably a bit too ambitious sometimes, we started writing down all the other things that could be possible.

A normal step sequencer. A performance grid. Per-step modulation. Expressive control. Different relationships between the sequencer and the sound engine. Analog and digital sound generation working together, plus Wavetables, LFOs, envelopes and way more. At some point we had this long list of ideas in front of us.

And instead of choosing, we decided to implement all of them.

That was the beautiful part and the difficult part. Conceptually, Medusa was not just “a synth with a sequencer.” The sequencer was part of the sound design. The grid was part of the performance. The instrument was trying to connect several worlds that usually live separately.

Looking back, I think some aspects were definitely ahead of their time. The idea of per-step sound design, expressive grid interaction, and treating sequencing as something closer to playing than programming feels very current now. At the time it was harder to explain.

Medusa taught us a lot. It showed us how far you can push the connection between interface and sound. It also taught us that a powerful idea still needs to be extremely clear in the user’s hands.

DelayDude:
Hardware instruments are currently experiencing a resurgence in cultural significance: musicians are once again seeking tactile, focused workflows and devices with a distinct identity of their own.

Where do you see Polyend’s role in the coming years—more as a manufacturer of specialized instruments, as a platform for new production methods, or perhaps even as a counter-movement to the increasingly algorithm-driven world of music production?

Piotr:
Maybe all of those things, but I would not call it a counter-movement in a romantic sense.

We are not against software. We are not against algorithms. We are not against AI. But we believe the human being still needs a physical point of contact with the music. Something with limits, character and resistance.

Polyend’s role is to make instruments with a strong identity. Not generic controllers. Not black boxes that do everything. Instruments that suggest a way of working.

At the same time, we are very interested in new production methods. I love the idea that an instrument can evolve with the user. Not only through traditional firmware updates, but through new sounds, new effects, new tools, and possibly things the user can download, code, or even create with AI. Having a platform that allows people to add something new to an existing instrument is definitely something we want to explore further.

Endless is a good example of that direction. It uses AI and code generation, but the final result is still a physical pedal with three knobs and a footswitch. So for us the future is not “hardware versus software.” It is about using technology to create more personal, more immediate instruments.

The danger with algorithmic music tools is that they can easily make everything feel average. Our goal is the opposite. We want technology to help people make stranger, more personal, more specific things.

DelayDude:
AI also plays a role in your work. Could you tell us more about the Endless AI FX Pedal System? How did its development come about? What challenges did you have to overcome, and how do you view the use of AI in the music world in general?

Piotr:
Endless came from a very simple observation: many musicians can describe the effect they want, but very few can turn that idea into DSP code.

There is a big gap between imagination and implementation. You might say: “I want a delay that becomes grainier with each repeat, with a footswitch that freezes the buffer,” and that is a clear musical idea. But normally you would need a DSP developer to build it.

With Endless, the idea is that you describe the effect in natural language, and the system helps turn it into a working effect for the pedal. It is not just a chatbot. It needs to generate code, compile it, validate it and make something that can run on dedicated hardware in real time.

One of the bigger challenges was making the system use our own DSP library in a meaningful way. We did not want it to invent everything from zero every time. We wanted it to draw from years of our work on effects, sound processing and embedded audio, then combine those building blocks in new ways based on the user’s idea.

That was the hard part. Audio is unforgiving. You cannot have glitches, crashes, huge latency or random behavior on stage. AI can suggest things, but the final result has to behave like an instrument.

In general, I think AI in music is interesting when it expands what people can make. I am much less interested in AI that copies artists or generates generic music in one click. That is not exciting to me.

For Endless, the goal is not to replace creativity. The goal is to let someone build the strange effect they have in their head, even if they cannot write C++ DSP code.

DelayDude:
Is there an interview question you’ve always wanted to answer, but that no one ever asks you?

Piotr:
Maybe: “Why is hardware so difficult?”

People often see the final product and think it is mostly an idea, a design, a few features. But hardware is brutal. You have electronics, mechanics, software, supply chain, manufacturing, testing, support, firmware updates, certification, failures, delays. Everything has to work together in the real world. If one piece of the puzzle is missing, there is no product.

A plugin can be updated five times in a week. With hardware, every decision becomes physical. A knob position, a connector, a screen, a part choice, a tolerance. It all matters.

So maybe the question I would like more people to ask is not “What does it do?” but “What did it take to make this exist?”

DelayDude:
Is there a device by another manufacturer that you wish Polyend had developed?

Piotr:
Not really.

There are many instruments I admire, but I do not usually think: “I wish we had made that.” Every good instrument is a result of a very specific company, team, moment and set of decisions.

What I do admire are instruments with a strong point of view. Devices that do not try to please everyone, but create their own workflow and their own world.

DelayDude:
Do you still find any time to make music yourself?

Piotr:
Running a company that makes instruments is funny, because you are surrounded by music all the time, but you do not always have time to make your own. Still, I try. And what I really enjoy is that different products pull me into different musical periods.

When we work on Tracker, I naturally start thinking in terms of complete tracks and arrangements. With Mess and Endless, I play much more guitar. With Synth, I get into creating synth parts and textures. And now with Drums, I spend more time making beats and thinking about rhythm again.

I like that variety. It keeps the connection with music alive in different ways. It is not always about finishing a song. Sometimes it is testing a machine late at night, making a loop, trying an idea, or just feeling whether something invites you to continue.

And that is very important. If we completely lost contact with the feeling of making music, the products would suffer. You need to remember what it feels like to be in front of a machine and either feel inspired or blocked. That feeling is the real test.

DelayDude:
Which three devices would you take with you to a desert island—assuming it had a power supply?

Piotr:
I would take three very different instruments.

First, Tracker Mini. It has a built-in microphone, so even on a desert island you could build your own sample pool from the environment. Waves, stones, insects, your own voice, whatever is around you. That gives you almost endless creative material. With the tracker workflow, you could turn that into complete pieces of music.

Second, a piano. It is probably one of the greatest interfaces ever made. Very simple on the surface, but with endless possibilities for harmony, composition, dynamics and sound. You can sit in front of it for your whole life and still discover new things.

And third, the Yamaha TAG3 C. Guitar is probably my favorite acoustic instrument, and this one is especially interesting because it combines a great guitar with a looper. I love loopers. I love building harmonies and progressions layer by layer. Yamaha created a really clever system where you can loop acoustically, and the guitar itself sounds great. It is a brilliant instrument.

And of course, I could also sample the piano and the guitar into Tracker Mini!

DelayDude:
At SuperBooth 2026, you unveiled the new Polyend Drums. Could you tell us a bit more about it—and, above all, what makes it so special?

Piotr:
Drums is probably the most ambitious instrument we have made.

The idea was to build a drum machine that combines immediacy with real depth. A lot of drum machines today fall into one of two categories. They are either very immediate but limited, or very powerful but complicated. We wanted both: something you can understand immediately, but still grow into for years.

It has eight tracks, and each track can work with analog voices, digital engines or samples. The analog side is very important to us. We are using modern high-quality components, but the goal is not vintage imitation. The goal is a strong, physical, modern drum sound that can also give an oldschool vibe.

The sequencer is also central. This is not just a sound module with patterns attached. The sequencing, modulation, performance tools, effects and sound design are all connected.

And then there is the physical object. Drums is built from a single piece of aluminum. The knobs and buttons are custom made. It is a very serious object. Not because we want it to look expensive, but because we wanted it to feel like an instrument you can trust.

What makes it special, I think, is that it is deep without trying to intimidate you. You can start making a beat immediately. But when you want to go further, there is a lot under your hands.

DelayDude:
Is there anything else you’d like to say to the people out there?

Piotr:
Yes. Thank you.

Polyend is not a huge corporation. We are a small team in Poland making instruments for people all over the world. Every time someone uses one of our machines in a track, on stage, in a studio, in a bedroom, it means a lot to us.

And maybe one more thing: making music is supposed to be fun. Sometimes the internet makes everything feel like a battle. Which machine is better, which workflow is wrong, which feature is missing, who is allowed to use what.

I think we could all relax a little. These are instruments. If our machine speaks to you, that is amazing and we are grateful. If it does not, that is completely fine too. There are so many great instruments out there. Find the one that makes you want to make music.

DelayDude:
Thank you very much for the interview—and see you next year at SuperBooth!