M8 Tracker: Initial collection of notes

Red Means Recording put up a video in which he announced his new album Rituals, then did a walkthrough of the song"Deep Throat", in which he explains how he programmed the song on the M8 Tracker in fair amount detail. He also shares the thought processes that went into composing the song.

The tracks on the M8 Tracker are not polyphonic, so you can only program one note at a time on one track. However, there are workarounds for playing chords on on track. One way is to use the Sampler instrument, and have it play samples of chords. Another way is to use the Macrosynth instrument's Wave Paraphonic engine. Using that engine type you can move between a selection of 4 note chord voicings, while also scanning through a wavetable to get different timbres etc.

Another way to play a chord on a Track is to use Tables. The M8 Discord Meetup #10 video shows this approach, first with the Macrosynth Triple Saw, then the FMSynth instrument. The video has other tips related to using Tables as well as tons of other info

Selecting within a phrase or chain to loop has been a struggle for me. One tip I got from a fellow user:

If I’ve understood you correctly, you can make a selection within a phrase or chain using shift + option and then hit shift + play so it’ll loop that portion in all tracks. That means you can edit one phrase within a track while being able to hear how it fits with the others without it advancing the song. Very handy!

Another struggle has been getting the hang of cloning a Phrase or Chain. The documentation tries to explain how to press the buttons, but I still found the procedure hard to understand. Basically, you have to hold the SHIFT button by itself, then press the OPTION button, then release the OPTION button, then press and release the EDIT button.

Another question that comes to mind is when to use Chains or Phrases. Some thoughts from fellow users:

IMO the best way to think of it is that phrases are the equivalent of pages in Elektron sequencers, and chains are the equivalent of patterns, but for individual tracks. My chains are usually 8 phrases long, but the optimal length really depends on how your song is structured. If you’re doing long chord progressions, it makes sense to have them all self-contained in one chain each, so you can just repeat the same chain over and over, rather than alternating between 2+ different chains, if that makes sense?

I’m trying to keep my chains to 4 phrases (64 steps). Multiple chains per track to add variation to melody / notation. 64 steps for phrases seems to calculate better in my head, considering I’ve used Digitone as a sequencer for years. If all chains use 4 phrases, across all tracks, everything will stay lined up as the song plays. However I have had a few smaller chains and everything then starts moving at a different rate, can be confusing for me.

A tip about the chance command:

One of my favorite things about the M8 is being able to use the chance command with one percentage to the left and another to the right. Similar effect to programming drums on the Octatrack, but instead of using an LFO to bring fx in and out, I use the chance command

Tip for using Groove for slides at very slow tempi:

I was working on a song at very slow (~40) BPM and wanted some really subtle slides. I was getting frustrated because doing a PSL even over just a single tick still took so long at this BPM that it felt overly dramatic.

“Nothing for it,” I thought. “I’ll have to double the BPM and go back and manually expand all my phrases over twice the steps to maintain the tempo.” I was half way through this laborious process when it hit me: if I could just increase the number of ticks each step in my phrase consumed, I would get more resolution out of each tick without rearranging my phrases.

And this, of course, is exactly what Groove let us do! I just doubled the ticks-per-step in the Groove page, doubled my BPM, and ended up exactly where I would have been, timing wise, if I had spaced out all my phrases.

All of which is to say: Groove isn’t just about getting swing in your patterns. It can also act as a “zoom” (or “page scale” in elektron-speak) that lets you, for example, lay out those chunky whole-note drones without breaking them up single-note-per-phrase over, like, 20 phrases or whatever.