Anti A4 GAS thread

No, you’re just in the wrong thread.

Also, shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, we’re trying to put people off buying one, you’re not supposed to tell them how awesome it is.

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I love the sound of it, but I’ve always had to spend a lot of time when making patches. It’s not necessarily an A4 thing, though. I love the DN’s sounds, but I have similar trouble finding just the right sweet spots there too. I just get there slightly quicker on the DN because there are fewer parameters to tweak and balance.

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None, and I would add more…

xD

Seriously, it may depend of your workflow. If I were you, besides making a new thread (that always can help clarifying), Ill take a look at the manual and see how it may help you or your music making and playing process… A read on manual will definetlly make a difference and you will realize if it can bring a lot to you or non. From my point of view, lots of people buying and selling stuff quickly saying the tool didnt fill their needs may be down to not reading the manual before purchasing, something im happy with, as then you have lots of second hand MINT condition boxes to purchased, cheaper :wink:

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For less than the price of a new A4 you could score a Nord G1 or a Nord G2 engine. But with either of those u might find one or two of the Elktrons u already have become redundant.

Not to sound too sharty but is it really the goal of an INIT sound to be inspiring? :octopus:

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When I owned an A4, I loved the sharty sounds it made, so much so it relieved all my GAS issues for several weeks.

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I think it is two different goals. For the showroom experience where you need to wow a customer with the first touch of the device, an amazing init patch makes sense. But if you just want it to be a blank canvas, that doesn’t make sense.

I bought a second A4 mk1, for $400, in a pristine condition. Two A4 is… amazing.

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I will do it for sure aswell at some point, just waiting for a good deal to pop up.

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me three :wave:
gonna get an mk2 when I can afford it.

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My first Elektron was an A4 mk1 £400. I sold it to help fund a syntakt and Prophet 5.

A4 could cover a lot of that poly stuff, I wish syntakt could handle polyphony differently and had an arpegiator.

I made some really gluey stuff on the A4. The voice stealing stuff works well and stops everything getting too much and too muddy.

Would I go back to an A4 and sell the P5 and syntakt? Probably not as I value the muscle memory and UI navigation of these two, A4 I found tricky with only 4tracks to keep track of where sound locks were.

Sonically though as others have said, it has sweet spots but also a lot of less desirable sounds too and takes work. My day job is a sound designer, and I didn’t ultimately have the patience to work with it. The best sounds come from very deep P locking / sliding parameters

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And layering - you configure just another layer, make some attack sound, and a 2nd layer for the ring out. Or unison 4 voices, drift them apart. Already checking Kleinanzeigen…

I sold a Rev2 in small part to fund an A4 (and some other bits). I love my A4: it has given me most of what I hoped for. But I would definitely like to have a knob-per-function poly again. Don’t sell that P5!

The modular nature of the A4 really shines when using the cv tracks to modulate the synth tracks. It’s insane. Anyways, I hope this helped! :slight_smile:

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yeah I think A4 really depends on how you use it and potentially what other gear you have… had a lot of fun with it as a solo groove box, I don’t really like kits but they are there for a reason. I feel like where it struggles a bit is if you have something like a DSI Pro2 or equality powerful synth to the A4 but it has knob per function and a full mod matrix. It become really difficult to want to reach for the A4 when you have something much faster to work on.

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@warpigs330, I think the A4 takes some time and effort to explore to start really hearing the magic. You’ll get cool sounds out of it right away, but it’s one of those machines that rewards deep exploration. I think it’s a lot like the Monomachine in that regard – actually, I think it’s a lot like the Monomachine in many other ways too.

Looking at your list of gear, I think a good reason to not buy the A4 is that it will likely take your attention away from the other instruments. At least that’s what happened to me. When I got it I dove deep into it and ignored everything else. I had all sorts of ongoing projects with other gear that I just abandoned, because I just wanted to explore the A4 more and more. I think that’s the main thing I can think about that to discourage getting one.

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anyone know how to find out what year your unit was manufactured with the serial number?
I wanna check the age of my A4.

I have a mk1 and there’s a sticker on the bottom panel with a manufacturing date and serial number.

I don’t know if there’s a way to see the serial number from within the OS.

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oh shit yea, I didn’t see the li’l date on the sticker there.

2016 mk1 here. Nice :slight_smile:

This thread did not run well for me, bought a 2nd A4 today.

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