Dirtywave M8 Model:02

This powerhouse portable tracker might be your new best M8.

Portable tracking is a booming, albeit niche, industry. Dirtywave, the Los Angeles‑based company behind the small but impressively powerful M8 tracker, have been quietly building a loyal following of M8 fans for about two and a half years. During that time, the M8 received many software updates, and despite having only one developer, it is currently on operating system version 3.3. And with a new Model:02 revision, it’s better than ever.

Timothy Lamb, the man behind Dirtywave, is a well‑known figure in the tracking and chip‑tune music scenes. Before moving into hardware production, he was involved with a software tracker called Little Sound DJ, which ran on the GameBoy platform. It proved highly popular and serves as an inspiration for the M8 today. So, despite Dirtywave being a new name in town, the M8 software has been a long time in the making.

The new Model:02 version improves on the first edition with a new aluminium enclosure, larger 3.5‑inch display (from the original 2.8), improved battery life (up to 12 hours), a built‑in microphone, and USB‑C instead of micro‑USB. In all other aspects, the Model:01 and Model:02 are identical.

Yes M8

The M8 is surprisingly sleek and compact, measuring 96 x 133 x 20mm. It fits nicely in the palm and is operated like a smartphone — with two thumbs. The 3.5‑inch IPS touch display is small but incredibly sharp. Data input happens through the eight mechanical key switches and, occasionally, the touch screen. I love the mechanical keys. They give the unit a classy feel.

Back, or rather top, panel connections include 3.5mm sockets for MIDI and audio I/O, and a USB‑C port.

Stereo audio inputs and outputs, plus MIDI in and out, are on 3.5mm TRS jacks and sensibly placed at the top of the unit. At a push, you can use the onboard speakers instead of the line output (which doubles as a headphone output), but they are tiny, so keep your expectations low. On the sides are a recessed on/off button and a slot for a microSD card.

The microSD card slot is found on the side of the unit.The battery provides about 12 hours of use. It charges through a USB‑C port, which also functions as a stereo‑in/out 16‑bit/44.1kHz USB audio and MIDI class‑compliant interface. Samples and songs are stored on the SDHC microSD card. The M8 can stream samples directly from the SD card, there’s no limit on sample size, and loading and saving songs is almost instantaneous.

In many respects, the M8 is a classic tracker. Eight tracks of sample sequencing are arranged in rows of hexadecimal notes and ‘FX’ (more on these later). But the M8 has many features that take it beyond what you might find in a traditional tracker. Virtual synthesizers cover a range of synthesis types, including classic console chip emulation, FM, physical modelling and virtual analogue, and there are effects (reverb, delay and chorus), modulation, tables (a sort of pattern within a pattern), stem rendering, groove templates and scale quantising.

You Wot, M8?

Trackers approach sequencing a bit differently from piano‑roll‑based DAWs and sequencers. Tracks are organised into rows, and notes flow from top to bottom. Each of the M8’s eight tracks can play one of 255 Chains. A Chain is a playlist of up to 16 smaller patterns called Phrases. Each Phrase can contain up to 16 steps. So, at the most, you’re working in 16‑bar chunks. Each step within a Phrase can play a different note on any instrument and apply up to three FX, which are instructions to transform the note somehow.

The eight tracks are monophonic. This standard limitation of trackers was originally there to keep CPU usage in check, and it has its downsides. You can’t sequence chords or polyphonic phrases without using multiple tracks, although the M8 does have some workarounds, which we’ll come to. However, the monophonic tracks have some creative benefits too, making them ideal for sample slicing, bass lines and leads. The ability to address a different sound on each step of a Phrase is also one of those features that, once you click with the tracker workflow, is sorely missed when moving back to more traditional sequencers. These inherent trackerisms helped shape music genres like chip‑tune, jungle, and IDM back in the 1990s.

School M8

Using the M8 requires a certain amount of muscle memory. Almost everything is done with the eight mechanical keys on the front panel. There are up/down/left/right keys for navigation, a Shift key, an Option key, an Edit key and a Play button. With just these, one can navigate pages, make selections, edit values, copy, paste, etc. Some time spent learning shortcuts is necessary to become proficient, but once the muscle memory kicks in, it’s a surprisingly fast workflow.

The navigation of the M8’s pages is very logical. When you start a new song or load an existing one, you’ll begin at the Song page. If you press Shift and Up, you’ll move to other Song‑related pages. Pressing Shift and Right will drill down into more detail, first editing the currently selected Chain, then with another press, the Phrase chosen within that Chain. A further right move will edit the Instrument assigned to whatever step you had selected in the Phrase. No matter which page you’re on, if you navigate up, you’ll get to pages relevant to the section you’re in, and if you navigate down, you’ll get to the Mixer and Effects pages. You can always see a small map showing you where you are in the system, although after a few days of regular use, you stop needing it. It’s an intuitive and fast way to move around the current project.

An M8 Song is composed of up to 256 rows. In each row, you can select one of 256 Chains to play for each of the eight tracks. To reiterate, a Chain is a playlist of up to 16 different Phrases, and a Phrase, in turn, is a pattern of up to 16 steps.

Instruments are the core of the M8, and you can have up to 128 Instruments defined per project. If you’ve used a tracker before, you’ll know that samples are the bread and butter of tracker music, so of course, the M8 has a powerful sampler on board. The sampler reads and writes...