Yeah. Bit of a curve but it really quickly becomes muscle memory and it’s just like playing a gameboy. In fact, the interface is based on the gameboy layout, it being the spiritual successor to lsdj

Yep. Phrase (a bar say) has 16 steps by default and you chain them up in chains. There can be an arbitrary amount of chains up to 16 in each block you see on the song view in my photo. So you could have a block with 3 chains in and one with 5 that resolves every 15 bars for example

Although there are 16 steps you can use ‘commands’ on any step to do all sorts of stuff. This is where the real power of trackers is. Those commands can be stuff like affecting fx sends, reversing samples, arps, there are dozens. There’s also one called HOP which you can use to jump to an arbitrary position in the phrase. So if you wanted, say a bar with only 10 steps, you could put a command on 10 to HOP to 0. The tracker doesn’t care about resolving anything it literally just follows things stepwise.

You can also edit the ‘duration’ of each step. By default its synced to the midi clock which use 6 ticks per step. You have a groove table where you can change that. That becomes ludicrously complicated and powerful. You can do simple stuff like swing, or mad stuff like compound times.

You can get the headless version if you can get hold of a Teensy 4.1 matrixsynth.com/…/diy-dirtywave-m8-headless-using…

Otherwise OpenMPT is a good bit of kit. Works with vsts too

openmpt.org

There’s a thread on the discord about that actually. I’m not sure it’s likely soon tbh

Yeah as a composition tool it’s amazing. You grow muscle memory with it really quickly. Also, it had midi in, so if you prefer to noodle on a keyboard, you can

I’m in the UK. Got one of the batch from last summer.

These were the brand mechboards.co.uk/…/work-louder-choc-keycaps-blind…

They’re from mech boards. Will dig out the order in a bit. I managed to break one of the original ones within about two days. Not a quality problem, sausage finger problem

I’ve been using Sononym. Really good bit of kit

Where are you?