I was wondering if it’s possible to record trigs via the pads on all tracks in live recording mode on the AR2 or just on the active track?
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I’m updating that it appears it is not able to.
Thanks for confirming. That’s really surprising.
It surprises me as well. I’m double checking the manual right now just to make sure though.
I don’t want to be rude since the AR2 is obviously a modern classic, but to me this is really disappointing. 
hit record + play, play the pads… they all go in the pattern. It works like it does on every other Elektron device I’ve used (expect the pad buttons are the trig buttons). Are we all talking about the same thing here?
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Does that allow the pads in one kit to record to multiple tracks at once in live recording mode? Simultaneous live recording to multiple tracks is the goal and I thought it looked like no, but I dont’ own a rytm. I’m looking at the manual still.
Yeah each pad corresponds to it’s own track, and the trigs get placed there.
Its just like live recording in track mode on digitakt or octatrack.
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Ok thanks, that seems a lot better! I was wondering what was up with this thing.
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Weird thread. Yes this works of course.
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Well, what prompted me to ask the question is the following part of the manual:
Hold [RECORD] and press [PLAY] to enter LIVE RECORDING mode. The sequencer will start to play, and the [RECORD] key will start to flash. You can now enter trigs to the active track in real time by playing the [PADS].
It says ‘to the active track’. I also couldn’t find anyone online recording multiple tracks at the same time. Then I asked chatGPT and it kept insisting that you can’t. 
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Can you imagine if you couldn’t live record all the pads on a drum machine like this?
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Unfortunately, I can imagine not being able to record different sounds to different tracks. A typical MPC drum program with mute groups can record all pads but if you jam it out, it normally goes to a single track and then you would “explode” the track which creates a copy of the track for each of the sounds present, but it’s a duplicate track and you have to go in and edit out the unwanted sounds from each track.
You can use that same drum program on multiple tracks and the mute groups still work, but it’s like recording one part at a time.
It’s certainly possible that I’m doing it wrong on the MPC, but for the RYTM the manual isn’t very explicit about the recording behavior. The language doesn’t imply that you can do this, which didn’t sound right considering the way other elektron devices work but this is the only one with pads aside from the models.
I’m glad someone who owns one came along because I’d probably still be reading the rytm manual now.
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I’ve recorded 95% of all my Rytm beats like this since 2013. Connect your favourite pad controller and live rec away. Sometimes I use both the Rytm pads and the trig keys if I want to do fast diddles, this works as well
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Were you an early beta tester for the original AR?! Public release of the AR wasn’t until Spring '14.
Probably misremembering it then… I always thought Rytm came out in NAMM 2013… Suppose it was NAMM 2014 then… Mandela effect hehehe!
Wait, this is getting really confusing. So can you record many pads simultaneously only if you use an external controller? Or also on the device pads as well?
No need for an external controller—you can just play the pads, or the first 12 sequencer buttons, or a combination of both, and it’ll record whatever you play in, either quantized or unquantized depending on which Live Recording mode you’re in (hit “record” twice to switch between quantized and unquantized).
What part of the manual did you find that? It may be referring to the Chromatic mode, where you use the pads to play different notes in one track.
In Chromatic mode, I think you can still use the first 12 sequencer buttons to play all the different tracks/parts as one-shots. But if you do, those chromatic pads will always only be for whichever track you hit last. (Unless you change the settings so that it doesn’t automatically switch to the most recent track you hit, which is buried in a menu… somewhere).
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Well if it scraped some of the ill informed replies bouncing around here it would be confused… of course it works, any Rytm user would know this, even just watching a video would confirm this
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Wait, I think I might know what’s tripping you up. Do you mean recording multiple tracks chromatically at the same time, or just playing the different pads like a drum machine?
You can record all the tracks at once by playing the buttons or pads live, like a drum machine. But I don’t think you can play or record chromatic notes on multiple tracks at the same time, if that’s what you’re asking. (Someone please correct me if that’s not true.)
When you’re not in Chromatic mode, each pad triggers one of the 12 different tracks (at whatever note you set that track to in the TRIG menu).
When you are in Chromatic mode, each pad triggers a different note in the same track.