I am working on an album and I have a sound design in mind which I am looking to produce on Elektron hardware. I have no background in and no knob time on Elektron hardware.
I have poked around a bit in the EZBOT discord and perused YouTube’s Elektron box offerings from Cuckoo, Oora, LooPop, EZBOT and a couple of others but I am still at a loss as to how to understand the role of each Elektron box in my “orchestra”.
If it’s helpful, the sound I am looking to create involves vocals, guitar, piano, with bass, fills, pads, etc provided by hardware samples. Based on some video I have seen of the Octatrack’s abilities in the sample and sequence manipulation department, I am inclined to believe I need at LEAST that. The overall vibe is somewhere between Billie Eilish, The Veldt by Deadmau5, M83 - essentially slower tempo beats, heavily processed vocals and interesting swing, modulation effects.
Anyway, I am looking for some help with understanding the Syntakt, Digitone, Digitakt, Octatrack, and Tonverk - what does each excel in, how they complement each other, and if you’re feeling particularly helpful: which combination would make sense to produce what I am after?
Thanks in advance and of course apologies if this has been asked elsewhere already
Syntakt: drum synthesizer with 4 analog and 8 digital voices.
Digitone: FM synth.
Digitakt: Sampler with emphasis on drums, or shorter sounds. Can do a lot more though, but maybe not the best for full blown music production.
Octatrack: Performance sampler made for creating music from samples, be it from live sampling or pre-recorded ones. Insane depth, some odd limitations but very inspiring and hard to learn in depth. I would say OT is the one for you, if you had to choose from the Elektron line-up.
Tonverk: Too early to say definitively but it looks like a sketchbook / rompler, maybe not the best for creating full songs due to limited sample editing. Pair it with an Octatrack and you’ll have a killer combo for song creation.
Honestly what you’re wanting to do, a modern MPC might be better than anything Elektron can offer.
We haven’t seen much from Tonverk yet to judge correctly as mentioned above.
From what you are describing and my experience best thig would be to get a Digitakt II and use an iPad or Desktop for sound sources. Desktop you have decades of high quality content available, in many cases free. iPad is more hands on and akin to hardware, so much better for hands on creative work (to me at least). Also the equivalent plugins on iPad tend to be significantly cheaper then Desktop counterparts, and you can get an iPad really cheap with enough power to use as sound source. I presume you already have experience in music production so you might already have several Synths and plugins.
Digitakt II will let you create some very nice stuff with just a proper sound source, while being fun and efficient.
OT is very complex but rewarding once you get the hang of it. Unfortunately, for a lot of beginners to Elektron that “getting the hang of it” can range into years. There is also a debate on sound quality. I personally prefer how a DT sounds, and I especially do not like anything directly sampled into the OT. Loading samples is OK.
Both OT and DT offer some limited “synthesis” options with single cycle or rudimentary “wavetables”, but they are not synths. You mention more classical instruments in your OG post, so I left out the Elektron synthesizers. There is no Elektron device that is both a sampler and a synth machine (apart from Rytm, but the sampler there is very limited for what you describe).
I think the OT sound quality debate is extremely overblown. The gain staging can be fiddly, like everything with the OT is but if you know what you’re doing the sound quality is just fine. The OT tone suck is just hyperbole. IMO Digitakt changes the tonal quality of a sample a lot more, adding an upper-mid shine to everything that I don’t really like. OT is more like painfully neutral.
It is true, yes. But considering all the other things you need to be very careful about when creating with OT, to me at least, it just sucks the fun out of making music. I do admit that I only had an OT for a short period of a few months as I got the sound I wanted out of other stuff much faster. I know quite a few people who swear by OT and never bought anything else after learning it.
Thanks for the feedback - I considered an MPC or a Maschine+ but given what I have seen of the Elektron boxes, they work closer to how I work. That rundown helps and aligns with what I have been advised previously:
It is very fiddly. Sampling is fiddly, looping is fiddly, gain staging is fiddly. Then you need to really understand the architecture and program a lot of stuff, do a lot of thoughtverk when making music. A lot of menu diving and a tiny screen. I totally get why a lot of people don’t like it.
But, the sound quality is just fine as long as you gain stage correctly and maybe use a master channel and a mixer / compressor on it.
Thanks for the advice - I am trying to steer clear of using my iPad/traditional DAW (just don’t like the experience as much).
I view the Elektron ecosystem as modular, so I get where you’re coming from in terms of there not being a comprehensive problem solver. I’m not really considering cost, so (as mentioned above) I am leaning toward an OT, DT, ST box mix and I can feed my traditional inputs in and go from there.
That’s a lot to learn and quite complex to build a verkflow for. To me it sounds like you’re jumping straight into the deep end of a pool without learning to swim first.
Maybe buy an Octatrack and see if you like it? You can always add more boxes later. And honestly pairing an Octatrack and a Digitakt is kind of redundant for most people.
If money is of no concern throw in an Analog Heat and a DN II and you are good for mostly everything :))
But to save yourself some more frustrating moments I agree to just buy an Octatrack first and learn it and then add other stuff (since you already want an Octatrack anyway).
sounds like your intention is to use samples, so it would be a sampler youre looking for; model samples, digitakt, octatrack, tonverk. the first three are monophonic, tonverk is polyphonic, so how you intend to work with your sample sources will dictate what is best for you. in terms of tonverk being a polyphonic sampler, it appears to be aimed more at experimental sound design than a straightforward sampler, and again depending on your intentions may not be suitable.
what is it that you think hardware will do that can’t be acheived in the DAW?
Fair point - my approach (given those 3) was to learn the DT first, then the OT (so at least there is a chain), then tack on the ST. I appreciate the steep learning curve and will definitely be enlisting some help when I hit walls.
But, maybe starting on an OT would be a good start as you suggest.
Honestly you can do a lot with the OT alone. It’s not a synth, true but as a sampler it’s crazy in depth. I would start with it and see if you need to even add anything else for a while.
That’s accurate - and yes, everything would be constructed from samples so that Tonverk is of particular interest based on what I have seen.
It’s not so much looking to boxes to achieve something a DAW can’t, it’s looking to boxes because I don’t get much joy from creating in a DAW. I like manual things (a day job working in software does that to you I guess).
It’s either this or I take up farming like every other person in my field haha
I think it’s solid, but start with the OT best thing probably.
Since you want a dawless approach. I will add that if I wanted to buy an OT today, I would definitely just have that and then pair it with an AH to get the desired crunch in and out of OT. But that can always be added afterwards, and you have even other options on the market.
I seem to recall from somewhere that the OT does not output stems though - so once the inputs have been OT’d, the output would be just the unified OT’d audio, right?
IDK, quite expensive just for a bit of crunch. AH is capable of so much more than just adding crunch of warmth, and you can achieve that with gear half the price or a free VST.