An Introduction

I didn't start out making music on a tracker. Like most people my age, I cut my teeth on Ableton Live; clicking and dragging loops around a screen, the way everyone learns now. What pulled me toward trackers was watching old jungle documentaries on YouTube, catching glimpses of that cryptic, spreadsheet-like wall of numbers in the background. I heard about how bangers like Urban Shakedown & Micky Finn's Some Justice had been made in Octamed, and realised producers like Xtra Spice Mikey / Phineus II, everyone's favourite jungle producer and super nice guy Sully and of course the almighty Paradox had embraced this style of production to build the sound of 90s jungle inside contemporary music. Something about it felt more authentic to the genre than anything I could get out of a DAW.

I must have mentioned this often enough that Defunkt Dialekt eventually turned up at my door with an Amiga 1200 in a suitcase and said, "You've been on about doing this for a while, here's the Amiga, now do it." I hooked it up to an Akai S1000 and a Roland JV1080 (forget Posh and Becks - these guys were the real power couple of the 90s), loaded up OctaMED, and that was it - I was away.

Years later, I still make music the same way, albeit these days in Renoise. Having had the awesome privilege to put music out on the incredible Bristol-based label Western Lore, as well as multiple features on BBC Radio 1, proved to me that the workflow works - not just nostalgia talking.

Outside of making music, by day I'm a developer - I head a small but very skilled team at a development agency, and I've been working in this feild for about 14 years now. It's been great to bring these two passions together within this project.

So I want to explain why I've spent the last several months building ElkTracker, and why I think it's worth your attention if any of this resonates with you.

All the gear, new idea

Like most music producers, I'm no stranger to a bout of GAS. Anyone who knows me knows I've had a "studio" full of random pieces of equipment for as long as I can remember. Some stay, some go.

Dedicated hardware trackers exist, and some of them are genuinely excellent, but they tend to sit at a price point that puts them out of reach for a lot of people who'd otherwise love to work this way, often several hundred pounds for a single dedicated device.

At the same time, I had a cheap Linux-based handheld knocking about: an Anbernic RG351V, the kind of device most people buy for emulation and retro gaming. The more I used it to replay games from my childhood like Super Metroid and Zelda - A Link to the Past, the more obvious it seemed that nobody had really utilised their form factor for exactly this kind of workflow.

Button layouts refined over decades of console gaming turn out to be a genuinely great interface for tracker-style composition — a d-pad and face buttons for fast grid navigation, shoulder buttons free for screen "diving", all of it already muscle memory for anyone who's held a controller. And because there isn't just one shape of retro handheld, you get to pick your layout: vertical, Game Boy-style devices if you want something pocketable; horizontal devices if you want a bigger screen and a wider grip; or clamshell devices in the Game Boy Advance SP form factor if you want something that folds shut and protects the screen when you're not using it.

That combination — proven ergonomics, real variety of form factor, and hardware that's already cheap and already sitting in a lot of people's drawers — is where ElkTracker came from.

What it actually is

ElkTracker is a full tracker-style music production tool, built specifically for these handhelds. It's not a toy or a tech demo: real track composition, a proper tracker workflow if you already know one, a powerful, 44.1Khz stereo sampler, and synth engines with strong DSP heritage, so the sound underneath isn't an afterthought either.

The concept, in short: a genuine pocket music studio, on hardware you might already own, for $29.

Why you should get involved

I use this software myself, for my own music, which means I have a direct stake in it continuing to get better. Updates are free for anyone who buys in; I'm not planning to nickel-and-dime people on point releases. I'd rather under-promise here than oversell a roadmap I can't guarantee, so I'm going to let the software's actual development speak for itself over the coming months, out in the open, rather than lean on marketing language to convince you.

If you're the kind of person who wants to see something prove itself before trusting it, sitck around and watch this space for a bit if you'd rather wait. No hard feelings.

Try it

If you've got a compatible handheld already, ElkTracker is available now. If you don't, most of the supported devices cost less than a nice dinner out, and you'll have a music studio and a retro game console in one pocket.

I'll be posting updates on development, and I'd genuinely like to hear from anyone who tries it — what works, what breaks, what's missing. This is early, and the people who get in now are going to shape where it goes next.