Heh, why am I not surprised to see you here…although I gotta say, you should probably take a break from the DSIforum because you are too angry to have conversations there with most people any more.
Anyway, here’s the quick rundown on Elektron boxes:in general.
You will almost certainly be happy with the sequencer, it is very very powerful and flexible.
Projects - you can’t load projects in the background on Elektron boxes either. This is one of the few things that does require you to stop the sequencer (although it will ask before you do so in case you are performing…). But an Elektron project typically contains 8 banks of 16 patterns and the patterns can be considerably more complex. Patterns have a nominal maximum length of 4 bars, but on the newer machines (ie the black ones) each track can have its own length and you can also set a master loop length, so you can have patterns that feel much longer because of the variations from multiple different track lengths.
So given you can load 16 ‘beats’ in a Tempest project, for all practical purposes you can load 4-8 times as many patterns (beats) in a single Elektron project, ie enough to have 8 songs assuming you just wanted to play linearly froms tart to finish. Realistically many of my projects only have 2, 3, or 4 patterns because the complexity of said patterns mean one can jam for ages without things feeling repetitive. Also the LFOs are free-running.
You should really read the manuals for existing Elektron products, but be warned that this is difficult, Elektron’s manuals are not tutorials and are not always that easy to read. There is no substitute for trying one out if you know someone else who has one. You will need to learn a lot of button combinations and get to understand several different operating modes; Elektron gear is not as easy to use as the Tempest and the front panel designs are arguably less good. I have described them elsewhere as industrial machines for audio engineering, they are not inviting musical instruments that are intuitive to play by the standards of the mass market.
On the AR doing bass, I think it’s too early to say. For my tastes, hell yess you can get great bass sounds from a single analog oscillator, and the filter in the AR (which seems to be the same as that of the analog Four) is super flexible and fun to work with. but if you want the rich voice architecture of the tempest, the Analog Four is really where it’s at, it can produce sounds of equal depth and complexity. I suspect I will get great bass tones from the AR, based on what I’ve seen and heard so far, but they will be blatantly synthy bass sounds that you may or may not need to layer with a sample to feel happy with.
If you crave the most advanced sequencing possibilities above all else, consider an Octatrack and pair it up with an other synth, even a DSI box (the sound engine is the best part of the TEmpest, it’s the sequencing side that disappoints). The OT lets you do the longest sequences (using track length multipliers) and lets you do 8 channels of polyphonic MIDI sequencing in addition to sample madness. The Analog Four is a really fantastic mono/poly synthesizer, very programmable but be aware tht it won’t drive other MIDI gear at present and may never do so, Elektron have refused to comment on twhether or not they will ever add that feature. The Analog Rytm will provide great drums (I believe) and you will be able to abuse it creatively for many synth sounds, but it’s never going to give you the same character as general purpose multi-oscillator synth like the Tempest or A4.
Timing is impeccable, workflow is impeccable (for me, not everyone). I love the sound and sequencing feel of Elektron gear. But there is a learning curve that many people find steep at first, you do have to accept/adapt to ‘the Elektron way’ of doing things which can be the opposite of other gear and quite confusing at first. They take bug fixing very seriously and give their gear a long life through updates, but they tend to be close-mouthed about exactly which features will be implemented or when - ie they don’t like to disappoint people by not fulfilling promises, so they don’t make promises and instead listen and then make their own decision. Sometimes this can be frustrating, but I would say they are a company that cares a great deal about their customers.
As an example of the frustration, the Octatrack allows you to assign the trigger buttons to also control which part of a sample should play, or to make different samples play, like a drum kit on a conventional keyboard. Unfortunately, you cannot access those two functions via MIDI so if you have a pad controller (or a Tempest) you can’t use the pads to trigger different sample slices or different samples on the OT, that’s only from the OT front panel. Why? I don’t know. Will it change with the AR arriving, and the AR having pads? I don’t know. Will it ever be added? ‘Maybe, we’ll consider it.’ So that’s an obvious feature quite a few people have asked for that would be easy to provide, but for now it isn’t there and it may never be. They deliberately avoid putting every possible feature in any one machine (partly so as not to undermine sales of their other products) and that annoys some people. Another example is the MIDI output on the Analog Four and Analog Rytm - for now and foreseeable future, these machines will not sequence other gear via MIDI and it’s possible that they will never do so, because that would cut across the territory of the OT, MD and Monomachine.
So, read the manuals, (probably several times) and watch a lot of Youtube demos. All the machines have a great deal in common, so even if you are set on the AR, you will find it instructive to watch the Machine Drum demos. If the workflow/programming style seems logical to you, they can get addictive.
