AR or A4 - Help me choose!

I recently bought an Octatrack which I love so much I sold all of my other gear to buy the Trinity :slight_smile:

The idea was to buy the A4 & AR to compliment the OT and just stick with these three boxes for studio and maybe live use.

Unfortunately my eBay sales didnā€™t go according to plan and I can either buy the AR or A4 now and will have to save up a bit more to get the remaining box a few months down the line.

Now Iā€™m faced with a dilemma as Iā€™m unsure which box to get firstā€¦ The AR or A4?

I make beat, heavy housey/techy music so common sense tells me to go AR but Iā€™m missing a synth to do melodies, basslines and such and could always do the beats with the OT in the mean time.

After scouring the forums it seems that the AR is a pain to get samples inside, the beats donā€™t sound good without samples and some people have called it half baked whereas the A4 seems to be more of a complete unit with few complaints.

If you were in my position and you could get one box now and the other a few months down the lineā€¦ which one would you get first to compliment the OT?

If it was me i would get A4 first. You can cover drums with A4 and OT until such time you get Rytm.

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Thanks, I was pretty much thinking the same thing.

yeah, definitely the A4. if you wanna do real, proper, contemporary electronic music and not just analog bleepyness everyone can do :smiley: deep; tech house and stuff :wink: the AR always sounds the same, thats its problem. You have no flexibility in Drumsound Design, its down to: layer a sample or use a sample at all. Not a big surprise though; its analog and everything is made from the same analog circuits so there simply CANT be much diversity here.

So yeah, buy the A4 first and then - dont buy the AR but buy a Machinedrum !!! Thats still top of the line for modern electronic music production imho. Although it doesnt have the power the AR is delivering and it lacks all the great performance features i really like on the AR. But you already have the OT so you can make up for something here with its scenes; controlling the MD via MIDI.

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Thanksā€¦ thereā€™s a couple of MDā€™s on eBay and second hand I could probably afford to get the AR & MD off eBay in one go!

A year back I watched Dapayk Solo on YouTube with his AR + OT setup and fell madly in love with itā€¦ I havenā€™t really looked that much into MDā€™s only because they are so old now and I assumed the AR has all of its bases covered and more.

I have a feeling that if I get an MD instead of an AR Iā€™ll regret it ā€¦ and if I got an AR first the resale is quite high if I didnā€™t gel with it - and Iā€™d be able to buy an MD.

Thats probably because Niklas heavily relies on Samples on the AR :wink: Heā€™s merely using the actual analog machines anymore - for the reason i told you! And if he does heā€™s barely ā€œdesigningā€ drums with it. I spoke to him once (heā€™s from the same state i come from here in Germany) and we had a little chat about the ups and downs on the Rytm back then :smiley:

I have several videos up on my Youtube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/subbz2k) and if you listen closely you can hear that the AR sounds pretty much the same all the time. If you like that kind of sound, sure, you will be better of with it. But trust me: If you are heavily into beats and designing the drum sounds so that they just fu**in fit into a proper contemporary electronic music style - you limit yourself with the Rytm, right from the start.

But in the end its up to you youā€™re right. You can buy one now, sell them later and still aford a used MD for the money.

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Iā€™ll need to do some more YouTube research I thinkā€¦ (subbed to your channel by the way).

Youā€™re making me wonder if I should give the DSI Tempest another lookā€¦ Hmmm, decisions, decisions :smiley:

Also (in case you arenā€™t already aware) you can use the A4 to make some pretty good analog drum kits and use the sound pool parameter lock to use different sounds on the same track. Leaving you 2 or 3 tracks/voices left for synth lines etc. Not something Iā€™ve tried myself yet but looks pretty useful. So youā€™d still have some of the AR features like conditional trigs etc.

Another option might be to get an A4 and a 2nd hand volca sample and the retrokit midi cable and just use that sequenced from your OT for drums til you can grab an AR/? Losing the ā€˜analogā€™ aspect and some of the performance features etc compared to AR but might work OK as a stop gap.

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Three good reasons why you shouldnā€™t read too much into internet opinions ā€¦ :zonked:

The AR is incredible sounding, more focussed than the A4, but the A4 has a broad broad pallette ā€¦ so with the A4, for the folk prepared to make the effort, thereā€™s gold in them there hills and it makes more sense if you also want to use the CV and external ins as well as noodle around in the depths

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I just sold a whole bunch of volcas (and other things) to get the money to buy the AR / A4ā€¦ Iā€™m not going back and Iā€™m loving the desk space I have now :smiley:

If Iā€™m going to buy anything else to add to the trinity, its going to be solid quality stuff and will require a lot of saving and planning (unlike the volcas which were cheap impulse buys that led to more).

Thatā€™s the impression I got from the ARā€¦ I think for live performance itā€™ll be a beastā€¦ Iā€™m just concerned about the issues with not being able to backup samples to PC and the ball ache in getting them onto the AR in the first place.

I will definitely own all three units at some pointā€¦ Iā€™m swinging towards the AR now only because Iā€™m still quite new to the Elektron way of thinking and anything too painful at this point will probably have me regretting selling my other gear!

Keep a virtual sample +Drive on your computer, whenever you want to upload something to the AR, put it in that folder on the computer first, then use C6 to upload it from there ā€¦ seems simple enough, plus, donā€™t try to load a tonne of samples straight away, youā€™ll only get impatient, load some, get a feel, then do a batch upload split over quite a few sessions so thereā€™s no issues getting stuff on

The AR has some magic sauce in it, but just be sure you understand that samples are handled in a more basic way than in many other devices and that it pays to prepare well - i.e. do conversion / chaining / on a computer first

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Interesting, though, to bring in Tempest in the mix.

If it wasnā€™t so rough around the edges, and no proper fx to go with that, it wouldā€™ve been a strong candidate. Thereā€™s nothing like it, really.

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Well right now the AR and Tempest seem like the only logical optionsā€¦ Iā€™ve just sold a Roland TR-8 which was great but limited in the sound you could get out of its kits.

I havenā€™t looked much into the Vermona and MFB drum machines only because they lack an onboard sequencer and Iā€™ll end up having lots of stuff on my desk again :smiley:

AR was my intro to the magical world of Elektron, having come from a MPC background it was quite alot to wrap my head around! But having the manual open and following along to some tutorials by Cuckoo made things much easier to grasp. After about a year with the AR I felt confident enough to buy an A4, glad I waited because there is an insane amount of modulation and sonic exploration waiting to be found.

I must admit, before the new AR machines were added it did feel a bit half baked. But now with the impulse and noise generator you can honestly build entire kits with huge variety just with these two.

Both machines can do synth & drums extremely well, just different scopes for different folks!

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You can make basslines with AR.
And I donā€™t feel like this machine is limited.
Machines are now pretty good, and AR does something nice to samples.

Try a used one if youā€™re unsure, but itā€™s a great machine.
Trig conditions and retrigs live recording make it more complete, 2016 was a very good year for AR !
Any comment before this year is pointless.

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Between the AR A4 and Tempest, thereā€™s so much different between each one.

The AR sounds SO good, itā€™s dead simple to operate, and you can easily get creative with samples and create melodies, bass lines etc. It pairs perfectly with an :elot: and the Scene and Perf modes are fantastic.
I often think about getting rid of the A4, and just limiting myself to the OT and AR.

The A4 has a wide pallet for sure, but itā€™s no raw anoalogue monster.
However if you laboriously search for sweet spots, thereā€™s a lot of interesting ones, and things can start to sound really good.
The functionality and features of the A4 are incredible for such a small little box.
What it lacks in classic analogue sizzle, can be easily fixed by adding any CV compatible VCO synth and routing it to the inputs on the A4. Allowing you to take full advantage of the A4 sequencer and itā€™s latest OS updates on you outboard synth.
The perf mode is incredible if you invest the time.
If you have an OT, the A4 makes total sense.

The Tempest, so akward.
In my opinion the Tempest smokes the A4 in sound, and interfacing.
The Tempest 8 event limitation, lack of banks, and small project sizes, sucks the life right out of Tempest for me.
It somehow redeems itself by how much fucking fun it is to jam on.
The built in samples seem pointless.
The Tempest and OT is one of the sickest combos youā€™ll ever get down with, youā€™ll be mad the OT only has 4 ins.
Tempest is kind of strange performance wise.
If knob twiddling and live tweaking gear is your thing, the Tempest rules them all, it makes the Elektron stuff feel kinda clunky, especially the A4.
However the Tempest is kind of selfish like that too. Without you actively tweaking it, it can sound pretty boring, and the lack of midi controllable parameters doesnā€™t help.

The Dark Trinity is aces :3lektron::3lektron::3lektron:

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I think the AR fulfills itā€™s needs as a drum machine far more than A4 fulfills itā€™s needs as a synth. But youā€™ll be able to cover the most ground with an OT/A4 combo.

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MFB drummers have sequencers. Clunky, but rich. For a dry and beautiful sound, listen to the TanzbƤr (not the lite version). Itā€™s mesmerizing.

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the AR scores with its performance features and the Trig conditions. Apart from that it is just an analog drum machine that is rather limited in terms of sound design - IF you only take the actual analog circuitry into account - and if you refer to Drum Design only !!! Apart from that it can do more, sure - it can create Pluck-Sounds, Basses and has the Sample Playback on top. But when it comes to pure Drum Sound Design it is rather limited and the different machines sound waay too similar to my ear (listen to the BD machines and remove the Pitch Bend for example - you will hear that they sound very very similar!) !! The Machinedrum offered way more in that respect. But it wasnt analog, sure - thats the other side of the medal.

However: I dont see why the A4 doesnt fulful its job as a synth very well?! It has everything you expect from a subtractive Synthesizer + a set of fantastic Effects - namely the Supervoid Reverb which comes close to Reverb Pedal Sound Quality !!! And you have flexibility with the Voice Routing, so you do poly wherever you need it and you do mono wherever you need that - at the same time. You can even lock a voice for a track you dont want to participate in the Voice sharing - so that it never gets notes stealed. What else can we expect? :frowning:

Comes all down to personal preference i think. In the end you really need to know WHAT you want to achieve with the machine you have in mind. So buying one and testing it in your own environment seems to be the only way to find out what machine you would keep i think.

@KennyJapan - thx for tuning in btw :wink: Wait till tonight; i probably have another track online if it goes well this evening :slight_smile:

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