I’m new to the Elektron world and thrilled to finally own an ARMKII. It’s an amazing machine with endless possibilities. Thanks to this community, I’ve learned a lot about its features, tips, and tricks. However, I’ve noticed that Kit/Sample management across projects seems to be a recurring challenge for many. Since my main goal is to use it as the centerpiece for a live ambient/electronica performance (30-60 mins), I’d love some guidance on optimizing this workflow.
Aided by another synth, some pedals and Ableton (eventually hoping to go DAWless), I’d like to improvise patterns, melodies and parameter tweaks as much as possible, with Kits as the baseline for it all.
Since copying Kits between projects does not guarantee Samples will be transferred as well (unless all Sounds are previously saved into +Drive), and this sounds a bit tedious, I was thinking of a workflow that basically entails duplicating the Presets folder (or alterations of it, with less Kits for example), so I can readily access all available Kits/Samples from the get-go, clear up any Patterns and Macros that are not relevant to my specific project/performance, and plan everything within.
I hardly think I’ll be using up al 128 Kits/Patterns in any project in my lifetime, let alone using up all the Projects bank - does this approach make sense? Do you foresee any issues, am I missing something?
I’d be very grateful for your insight! I do apologize in advance if this is a repeated issue - if there’s a current thread around this, I’d be happy to be referenced to it!
30-60 minutes of ambient/electronica can easily fit into single project, say your avg track is 6 minutes (just for easy calculation purposes) and consists of 2-4 patterns per track, that means you have somewhere between 20-40 patterns (out of 128 available) to work with, the 5-10 kits (out of 128) are shared across the tracks.
that leaves a lot of headroom both for kits and patterns.
you can also use banks per track for better organization, so you have 8 tracks to perform and you know that every pattern of track 1 is on bank A, track 2 bank B, etc.
you can double the track count if you don’t exceed 8 patterns per track and have something like:
Bank A - patterns 1-8 - track 1, patterns 9-16 - track 2
Bank B - patterns 1-8 - track 3, patterns 9-16 - track 4
etc.
no reason to worry about multiple projects if you can fit into a single one.
and you can use song mode to switch between everything so you can focus on playing rather switching patterns…
Are you saying you want to base some of your tracks on the presets?
If not, this step seems like it creates more work than you need to do. It’s quite fiddly to remive/reset things. Personally, I just ignore all the presets and start new projects from fresh. It’s purely an ego thing, but also means I know what’s in each project when I start one (ie nothing). I’m certain the Elektron sound designers are better at it than me… I just like doing it all myself.
Some thoughts:
why not save the sounds you like as Sounds? Doing this adds opens up thenpossibility of using them as Sound Locks. It also guides you gently towards a library of your own sounds, which is a worthy venture. You have 4096 Sound slots in selectable Banks, so you can use this to help organise lots of sounds
copying patterns and kits from one Project to another is a pain. My current “mission” has me writing tracks in individual projects. I will copy them to a dedicated live set Project when I have enough of them. I settled on this after working on one track which needed three or four banks worth of experiements to get into a shape I was happy with. I realised I couldn’t do rhat if I was working on multiple tracks in a single Live project. I’m going to do the live set assembling in stages, rather than all in one go, to spread the fiddly work over several sessions. It’s slow, but I have no deadlines.
another approach could be to work in a single project and to save variations of it as I add new tracks/Patterns. This would allow me to make experiments w/out worrying about filling up the project with variations of a track.
@alechko - the Bank/Pattern setup sounds right! it’s very much what I was thinking, I definitely believe any set can easily fit into one project, even if this project already contains all the Preset Kits and Samples. The main limitation I would see here is, if I want to use more than 127 samples in that Project. However, at the moment I don’t anticipate this happening, although of course I might run into surprises along the way . A friend of mine told me that he’s been using the same Project as a baseline for his entire work for the past 8 years…
@Octagonist - As part of my initial explorations I tried creating Blank Projects, and when realizing that I can only access the Sounds located in +Drive, that I had to load each Kit individually and, even then, Samples were not all carried over, I quickly realized that this would not work for me. I’d like to start with my Kits and Sounds readily available (same as when I load Ableton, for example - I can access all my Instruments, Effects, Samples and Presets). I will definitely be saving Sounds I like, though. Best way I can think of (which is what you lay out in point 4.) is duplicating the Presets Project (the factory one that contains everything), for example, or one I set up with Kits that I already like, delete all Patterns and start fresh… I think this would be more straightforward that Copy/Pasting Kits and Samples from other projects.
Of course I will (most surely) encounter may other issues along the way - guess one can’t have everything planned out perfectly from the start! As a thought experiment, it would be interesting if in MKIII the structure can be changed in such a way that, regardless of what Project you’re working on, you can access/load any and all Kits/Samples stored in the Machine…
damn, this is pretty brilliant! I’ll absolutely be looking into this. I see that the Presets project (factory default one) already has around 100 samples, if I’m not mistaken - so I will have to find a good approach to clear up some slots and manage others as I move along.
if this is going to complicate things I’d see first if the 127 slots per project is enough and then started consolidating stuff, that’s a lot of samples honestly…
Absolutely, 127 should be well more than enough - I guess I just need to learn to manage them efficiently when duplicating Projects.
Something I came across yesterday which I hope is not just a happy accident - I found that when copying Kits between Projects, the Samples used in each Kit where actually carried forward and were correctly assigned to their pads! Maybe it’s the new firmware update that now allows for this to happen seamlessly? Maybe I’m missing something? I tried it with 2 Kits and it seems to work… This would mean that everything just got much easier!
. A friend of mine told me that he’s been using the same Project as a baseline for his entire work for the past 8 years…
I tried it with 2 Kits and it seems to work… This would mean that everything just got much easier!