A drumming robot from north-eastern Poland.

Polyend is a Polish company, and it is based not in Warsaw but in Olsztyn, in the Warmian-Masurian region of north-eastern Poland. The Polish court register shows Polyend sp. z o.o. registered there in September 2015, the company’s early website says Polyend “was brought to life in 2015,” and its press releases are datelined Olsztyn. Its founder and chief executive is Piotr Raczyński, named as founder in the company’s releases. “Before we started Polyend, I was fiddling around with DIY guitar boxes,” he said in 2026; three years earlier he said he had been using trackers since he was eleven.

Its first product was unusual. The Perc Pro, a set of MIDI-controlled mechanical beaters that strike real drums and other objects, premiered at the Musikmesse trade fair in April 2016, according to the company, with pre-orders from May; by 2017 its website said there were “hundreds of PERC PRO sets throughout the world.” Sound On Sound, reviewing it in August 2017 as the work of a “brand new Polish company,” priced the basic three-beater system at £1,049 and called it “a unique and somewhat niche product.” The company says Aphex Twin, Daedelus and Dan Deacon tested it and that it appeared with Jamie Woon at the 2016 Mercury Prize ceremony in London; its later website published endorsements attributed to musicians including Aphex Twin, Tom Rowlands of the Chemical Brothers and Orri Páll Dýrason of Sigur Rós.

Seq, Medusa and a hardware tracker.

Sequencers and controllers followed. The Seq, a 32-step MIDI sequencer, was praised by SOS in July 2019 for “a puristic approach to sequencing” — “all with debonair good looks!” — at £879. The Medusa, unveiled at Superbooth in Berlin in 2018, was a hybrid synth made with the Greek synth maker Dreadbox, which SOS reviewed in April 2019 at £879; Raczyński has said Dreadbox asked whether Polyend could add a sequencer to one of its synth concepts. The Poly 2 MIDI-to-CV converter and the Preset parameter recaller rounded out the early range.

The product that made the name was the Tracker. Sound On Sound introduced it in March 2020 as a device from “Polish synth-makers Polyend” that might bring the tracker — the vertical, Amiga-era style of sequencing — back to the mainstream, and English Wikipedia calls it the first standalone hardware tracker, released in 2020. Reviewing it in November 2021, SOS called it “an instrument that’s as forward-looking as it is retro.” Raczyński later said a portable version had been planned first, but “part delays and sourcing issues” pushed the company to a desktop format. The Tracker Mini, a 350-gram handheld with a battery, a built-in microphone and stereo sampling, arrived in 2023 and the Tracker+, with stereo sampling, synth engines and 16 tracks, in May 2024 at $799 or €799; a machined-aluminium Tracker Mini, made to order, marked the company’s tenth anniversary in June 2025.

The Play groovebox, announced in May 2022 with eight audio tracks, eight MIDI tracks and more than 30 sample packs, was “a refreshing take on the drum machine/groovebox format,” SOS said in March 2023. The Synth of November 2024 plays three engines at once, with models the company says draw on the Casio CZ-101, the Roland SH-101 and the Prophet-6, and a physical-modelling engine it says has roots in the work of Mutable Instruments; SOS reviewed it in April 2025 at £479.

Design and documentation.

Beyond the largest names in electronic instruments sits a tier of smaller synthesizer makers, some dating from the 1960s and others barely a decade old. Many have changed hands.

Oberheim, founded by Tom Oberheim in 1969, passed to Gibson after a 1988 bankruptcy; English Wikipedia says Gibson returned the trademark to its founder in 2019. Focusrite plc says it bought the Oberheim brand and trademarks from Tom Oberheim in 2022, and the brand, based in San Francisco, now works alongside Focusrite’s Sequential. Buchla began with Don Buchla in Berkeley in 1963; Australian investors bought it in 2012, and in 2018 its assets passed to Buchla U.S.A., which says many products are hand-built to order.

Waldorf, founded in 1988, went insolvent in 2004; Waldorf Music GmbH, set up in 2006, gives its address as Remagen, Germany. Access, maker of the Virus, calls itself a privately held German manufacturer; its website is published by Kemper GmbH of Recklinghausen, and German Wikipedia says no Virus has been produced since February 2024.

Modal Electronics, a British company incorporated in 2013, entered administration in 2023; after a 2024 restructuring involving Alltronics Holding, Modal calls itself a brand of a Hong Kong–registered company. Polyend, founded by Piotr Raczyński, is based in Olsztyn, Poland. 1010music, which debuted in 2016, gives Los Angeles as its home and lists China as the country of origin for its current hardware.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A small team in Poland.

Recent products have moved towards pedals. Step, Mess and the analogue Press compressor arrived in 2024 and 2025; Endless, announced in January 2026, is an effect pedal that loads effects written in C++ with Polyend’s open SDK or generated from a text description in a beta tool the company calls Playground, in a machined-aluminium case with a magnetic, swappable faceplate. In May 2026 Polyend showed Drums, an analogue and digital drum machine with eight tracks and four analogue voices in a single-piece aluminium body, at Superbooth; in August it introduced Keys, a mechanical QWERTY keyboard for musicians; and in September it announced Loop, an eight-track performance looper priced at €599 and due to ship in October 2026, Sound On Sound reported.

Polyend remains privately held. No corporate owner appears in the Polish court register, which lists one individual as holding a controlling stake, and we found no record of an acquisition. “We are a small team in Poland making instruments for people all over the world,” Raczyński said in a 2026 interview on the company’s site. Where those instruments are manufactured is less clear: the company says Drums, “like our earliest instruments,” is made in small batches, but the releases, terms and interviews we checked do not name a country of manufacture, so we do not either.

For a design guide, Polyend shows how a small company can build an identity on reviving old ideas — the drummer’s beater, the Amiga tracker — in new hardware. Compare Elektron, the Swedish groovebox maker, and Teenage Engineering. For this guide we use graphite, aluminium grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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