“Curious, foolish and ambitious”: How Polyend’s Synth is reimagining synthesizer designBenn Jordan isn’t a Polyend employee, but the company frequently consults him when developing new instruments. And he’s never been shy about discussing many of them to his 459,000 YouTube subscribers. Two years ago, the company’s founder Piotr Raczynski showed Benn an early prototype of the Polyend Synth. “To be honest, I didn’t completely get the vision,” the producer, content creator and researcher tells me.
But by that stage, Polyend had already settled on the physical design. “The grid has many advantages over the traditional keyboard — for example, [it can] fit way more notes within a small footprint,” Piotr explains. Still, the clever interface ideas that would elevate the Synth weren’t there yet. According to Benn, “it only had one synth engine” and despite the grid’s potential advantages, he just didn’t see the form factor “vibing” in the same way that Polyend’s Tracker and Play instruments do.
In that iteration, Polyend’s Synth was just another digital synthesizer, like many others out there, but in a black rectangle with pads instead of a keyboard. Piotr stuck with the idea, though. “We knew that we wanted to make a grid-based device… and knew there was still plenty of room for innovation. But, as it’s highly customisable, it can sometimes be disorientating. We knew we needed a solution.”
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
Polyend’s solution is so simple that it now doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary. For Benn, it wasn’t until he got his hands on a more complete unit a few months back that it finally clicked and he realised “how brilliant the thing is” he says. “Once I saw the multi-engines in use together with sequencing… oof. So nice.”
Polyend combined several different concepts to create an instrument greater than the sum of its parts. It starts with an incredibly broad pallet of sounds.
“We created separate synths, each with its own character,” Piotr says. There are eight engines in total covering everything from emulations of vintage analogue synths to harsh wavetables, physical modelling and modern FM.
But we live in a world where Arturia’s MicroFreak and MiniFreak are already covering this ground. These are also digital synths with powerful multi-engine cores capable of shapeshifting in surprising ways. This wasn’t the real challenge, as Piotr explains. “We knew that we were not building one system that shares some standard components and making a multitimbral architecture… Then, the interface challenge was allowing users to play three separate synths at once.”
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
This is where the Polyend Synth starts to separate itself from everything else on the market today. The Smart Grid goes beyond the standard pad-style controller that lets you switch between chromatic and scale modes, though it can do that too. You can split the grid up into three sections, each of which controls a different synth engine.
Think of it like setting up a split on a keyboard, but with a lot more flexibility. If you only need one octave of a pentatonic scale for your bass line, you can confine one synth to just five pads along the edge, leaving open a wide expanse for two other synths to play chords and leads on. Or you can split the grid evenly three ways. If you prefer a horizontal layout to a vertical one, there are options for that.
You can’t design your own custom grids, but the 12 built-in layouts give you more options than any other pad controller that I know of. Piotr hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a custom grid editor — in fact, the company beta-tested one during development, but everyone just ended up using the grid presets anyway. Pior adds that the company hasn’t received many requests for the feature at this point.
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
However, having three different playable synths available simultaneously presents some challenges. For one, playing three instruments at the same time is exceptionally difficult. Sure, Polyend could have just added a sequencer and called it a day, but that would make the Synth a groovebox, and Polyend already sells several of those. The focus here was on performance, adding “the smart grid and chord follower mode [kept] it highly playable and fun,” Piotr said.
Let’s focus on those words, “fun” and “play” for a moment. In a recent video, YouTuber and music producer Taetro talks about how so much gear is focused on making music, with an eye towards a finished product recorded for posterity. But “I do remember a time when I used to play music,” he says early in the clip before digging into how the Polyend Synth forces him to have fun with instruments again.
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
The final piece of the puzzle that makes the Polyend Synth something for playing music, versus making music is the chord follower. Each synth can have its own arpeggiator or sequencer settings, but as long as one synth is in a chord mode (either standard chord, chord scale or using a chord pack), the other two synths will follow the root notes to keep in tune.
So let’s imagine you’ve got a basic arp for your bass and a little lead flourish that you want to come in at the end of every four bars, but you also need to play a long, spicy eight-bar chord progression. With most instruments, playing this and keeping the bass and lead fill following your chords would require some serious finger dexterity. But the cleverness of Polyend’s Synth is that you can latch the bass and, as you change chords, the root note of your bass arpeggio will follow. And, even if you just hit the same pad over and over for the lead, it will also stay in tune with the backing chords. The pads also support polyphonic aftertouch which opens up levels of intuitive expression not normally available on this sort of mass-market device — not bad for $499.
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
The layout, the sounds, the sequences, the macros for tweaking the patches — all of these are saved together in Scenes. These are distinctly different from a project on a groove box, though. You can’t just open one of the producer-made preset Scenes by Venus Theory or Renoizer and hit play. In fact, there is no play button. Piotr’s thoughts were: “Since the Synth is more of an instrument to be played, we didn’t want users to simply load projects, hit play, and listen. Instead, we aimed for projects that could be performed live. This led us to the concept of Scenes, which are more akin to presets than traditional projects.”
What would normally require several pieces of gear, a mastery of a complicated sequencer or prodigy-level finger dexterity is accessible to a broad swath of the public with the Synth. Playing rich multi-part synth arrangements isn’t limited to those with deep pockets and a studio full of gear; it can be done in your living room.
The Synth is the next evolution of the synthesizer from gadget to modern parlour instrument, following in the footsteps of Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators and Korg’s Volcas. Where once the upright piano or a cheap acoustic guitar would be the most common instruments in a home, you’re increasingly likely to find a tiny affordable synthesizer. They’ve found their place among amateurs simply looking to entertain themselves or others, rather than record a hit single.
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
Creating an instrument that can deliver this level of harmonic complexity while also being a viable parlour music option wasn’t easy. It took roughly three years for the Polyend Synth to reach its final form. “The biggest challenge was the interface. We developed 12 different prototypes. It took us quite a lot of time to nail the thing down. The goal was to give users something familiar, intuitive, and easy to grasp in the first five minutes of operating it. But also deep enough to allow further exploration once you get the basics,” Piotr explains.
Judging from the early reviews (and my own hands-on time) it seems that Polyend has successfully struck this balance of immediacy and depth. Depending on where you look you’ll find artists like Federico Chiesa, better known as Oora, praising its more advanced capabilities saying the Synth is, “made for the sound designer, for the people who really like to dig into the sound.” But Emily Hopkins (AKA the Harp Lady) is quick to point out that you can learn most of what you need to know to use it in an afternoon.
The biggest criticism so far is that the firmware still feels incomplete and buggy. In particular, the pad sensitivity just isn’t dialled in yet and it defaults to full velocity. This state is how the company recommends using the Synth for now, which makes getting nuance out of the instrument a little difficult.
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
It helps that the Polyend Synth is built on the same microcontroller as its Play+ and Tracker+, the upgraded versions of its Play and Tracker grooveboxes that include early versions of some of the synth engines in the Synth. The company knows the hardware inside and out at this point. It’s tested the limits of its processing power, given many of the synth engines a trial run on those grooveboxes and even managed to keep the price reasonably low. Content creator Vulture Culture even called the Synth “the best value in music production today.”
For Piotr and the Polyend team, the goal with the Synth wasn’t necessarily to make something revolutionary. They didn’t want to build the most powerful synth, the smallest synth, or the synth with the longest sequencer. The focus was on making something fun that was more than just a musical toy.
“We engaged in a discussion about the ideal setup for our creative process and found that the best results come from using three different devices along with a few effects. Four devices always felt like too much, while two didn’t suffice,” Piotr said.
And with that core concept settled, the company carried forward, even if not everyone immediately got the vision. In a world where it often feels like companies are happy to make the same instrument over and over, cashing in on their legacy, Polyend is offering genuine innovation. Piotr summed up the company’s philosophy perfectly: “We like doing things differently, which is a more risky and challenging path, but this is who we are — curious, foolish, and ambitious.”
Polyend Synth. By Simon Vinall for MusicTech.
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