What can the tempest do that the OT can’t? Obviously they are two very different machines but I feel like they may have a lot of overlap in terms of performance.
…and what about sampling? 
The Tempest is a strange beast. But it’s nothing like the OT.
It’s closer to the A4, except it’s poly, the sequencer kind of sucks, it is half the machine it was supposed to be. Roger Linn lost out to Dave Smith, philosophically. Quite honestly, there’s no excuse for a drum synth that expensive and powerful not to have audio inputs and even ONE MINUTE of sample memory. Or, at the very least, 500mb of user sample memory…
But I digress.
It’s an 2 analog oscillator/2 digital oscillator, 6 voice polysynth that’s geared towards drums. The OT and the Tempest are a great combo.
The polysynth mode was added a month ago in an OS update and makes it very much worth the price tag:
Best way to describe a Tempest: An AKAI Pad Controller and a Tetra had a baby with more oscillators and 2 more voices.
The Tempest is a strange beast. But it’s nothing like the OT.
It’s closer to the A4, except it’s poly, the sequencer kind of sucks, it is half the machine it was supposed to be. Roger Linn lost out to Dave Smith, philosophically. Quite honestly, there’s no excuse for a drum synth that expensive and powerful not to have audio inputs and even ONE MINUTE of sample memory. Or, at the very least, 500mb of user sample memory…
But I digress.
It’s an 2 analog oscillator/2 digital oscillator, 6 voice polysynth that’s geared towards drums. The OT and the Tempest are a great combo.
The polysynth mode was added a month ago in an OS update and makes it very much worth the price tag:
Best way to describe a Tempest: An AKAI Pad Controller and a Tetra had a baby with more oscillators and 2 more voices.[/quote]
Well say like me you, you have a tetra. Then really the tempest has nothing to offer? that can’t be right can it but on the face of it it seems so.
The Tempest is a strange beast. But it’s nothing like the OT.
It’s closer to the A4, except it’s poly, the sequencer kind of sucks, it is half the machine it was supposed to be. Roger Linn lost out to Dave Smith, philosophically. Quite honestly, there’s no excuse for a drum synth that expensive and powerful not to have audio inputs and even ONE MINUTE of sample memory. Or, at the very least, 500mb of user sample memory…
But I digress.
It’s an 2 analog oscillator/2 digital oscillator, 6 voice polysynth that’s geared towards drums. The OT and the Tempest are a great combo.
The polysynth mode was added a month ago in an OS update and makes it very much worth the price tag:
Best way to describe a Tempest: An AKAI Pad Controller and a Tetra had a baby with more oscillators and 2 more voices.[/quote]
Well say like me you, you have a tetra. Then really the tempest has nothing to offer? that can’t be right can it but on the face of it it seems so.[/quote]
It’s a much more powerful synth and is certainly better at percussive sounds- but, in reality, it’s kind of a strange mutant drumsynth. Lots of people like it but I’d rather have a more simple drum machine AND a 6 voice hybrid polysynth rather than both crammed into an unwieldy package.
Demo one if you can. They sound great but building a drum kit is a lot of work and you end up just programming bass lines and leads because it’s more natural.
Comparing apples and oranges really. Often, things are not “better” or “worse”, but just simply different. 
The real question is; what can’t you do with your current setup that you want to do, and what piece of gear will do it for you?
Gear Whore Tip #25:
If you buy high demand gear for a good price on the second hand market, you can almost always sell it for what you bought it for- sometimes more!
If you have some cash laying around, just try stuff and if it isn’t for you, sell it!
I have an OT, a4 and tempest. The tempest is mainly used for synth sounds and the kick, ot for percussion and a4 also synths. The advantage of the tempest is
- 8 bars of 1/32 notes (love this)
- wavetable waves (prophet vs waves and many more for percussive use)
- 6 voice outs. I use the main outs for poly sounds, and some of the outputs dedicated to a sound. With a mixer you can get great results this way
- velocity and aftertouch (poly aftertouch in fact) sensitive pads
As much as i want them to hurry with some promised new features, i’ll probably never sell my tempest. Sounds good and is really versatile
Odd thread, the tempest and OT are absolutely nothing alike.
For me the Tempest is the most flexible and instinctive drum machine I’ve ever owned. I love mine and would never part with it.
I can do entire aphex twin SAW style tracks on just tempest with 1 external reverb.
No and yes. You can do about 80% of what’s possible on the Tempest with the Tetra, sonically speaking. But it’s a very different proposition.
[ul]
[li]Sampled waveforms. The Tempest has ~450 of them, of which maybe 400 are various drum sounds and the other 50 are noise/waveforms. They’re very very good sounds, and it helps that you can vary the pre-post filter feed.[/li]
[li]Pads, obviously. They’re not just decorative, they are a real joy to play, for synth sounds as well as drums. I’m playing in things in real time a lot more often with the Tempest whereas I would sequence them in the OT/A4.[/li]
[li]Knobs and controllers. The front panel of the Tempest is (mostly) very well designed and the large display means menu diving is fairly minimal. It’s not perfect (what is?) but unlike some other DSI gear it’s very easy to get around without an editor. However it has to be said that operating system development & documentation also lags other DSI gear.[/li]
[li]The sequencer…it’s not that great, and is still missing some major obvious features, like rotate (played in several drum lines, but everything is slightly behind the clock? too bad, you’ll have to play them again because there’s no way to shift events forward or backward in time). Compared to Elektron sequencers it’s pretty weedy and if I didn’t have an OT sitting next to it then I’d feel bummed. However! You can sequence 8 bars, the quantization is excellent, and switching between multiple different beats (patterns) on the fly or via the playlist is very cool. So are beat-wide effects and roll functionality.[/li]
[li]Lots of outputs. As well as the main stereo outs you have 6 individual voice outs…which are stereo jacks, so by selectively panning sounds left or right you have 12 individual outputs, which is not to be sneezed at. That’s more outputs than I have mixer channels or recording inputs at the moment, but it’s nice to know that when I add a mixer later or if I take the device to a commercial studio that I can track a lot of audio at once.[/li]
[/ul]
I would say the OS is only 80% done, not that it’s unstable or significantly buggy but there are some basic features missing like proper handling of MIDI input. They underspecified part of the hardware (there’s only 4mb of onboard storage for all patches/sequences, plus another 4mb for sampled waveforms), which is just fucking stupid. At the list price it really should sample and let you run external audio through the filters/mod matrix for wild audio effects. I got a great deal on mine from another Elektronaut and am very happy but I would not pay $2000 for the Tempest even if the house burned down and I had insurance money, I’d probably buy a Machinedrum and a pad controller.
Finally, the built-in effects are weak. The distortion and compression only work on the stereo output. The distortion is bypassed normally (good) but has a big click when you switch it in (bad). The compressor is…unremarkable. Both distortion and compression only have 1 control each so while they’re fun to reach out and tweak during a jam session I rarely have them engaged for more than a second or two; they feel half-assed and unecessary. I’d rather have had compression or distortion with 2 controls for each. Probably the compressor actually, because with amp feedback on the individual voices (which can yield truly brutal sounds), the distortion is rather redundant.
Then there’s the delay, which just adds MIDI notes. They say this is to preserve an all-analog signal path…well then why not put a bucket-brigade delay which is all-analog. The MIDI delay is lame and more likely than not will just result in voice stealing in a busy pattern, so I almost never use it… It might be more interesting when they get around to implementing free-running LFOs so that you can make the delayed notes do something interesting. As it stands it’s a failed idea taking up valuable front panel space. Oddly enough the sample-playback chip inside the Tempest (a Dream 3716) is also capable of pretty advanced DSP for effects, even reverb. I would far rather have had some digital effects available in parallel to the analog voices as on the A4.
Fortunately, thanks to all those individual outputs I can send individual voices out to other gear such as the OT/A4/etc. so in that sense I’m not restricted. And the compression/distortion are handy to have available when you’re working on an individual sound, eg they sound lovely on analog bass sounds. but as I said above, they feel really half-assed compared to the voice engine, and the fact that the delay controls are in one-place and sequencer based while the distortion/compression are in a different part of the panel and operate on the audio signal suggests to me that they are the outcome of a botched compromise. I’ve ranted at length about these because they really are substandard compared to the rest of the machine, and at the list price I expect these design issues to be worked out in advance - it’s better to leave a feature out that to implement it poorly. But their shortcomings don’t make the rest of the machine any less usable.
Having said all that about the Tempest, it complements the OT very very well, and will do so even better when they’re done building the Tempest’s MIDI implementation (which should have been in place at release, but is nonetheless getting there…and Chris Hector, the lead dev, does actually engage in conversation about the design on an almost daily basis and asks users how they want things to work, so credit where credit is due).
Right now the limitation is that you can’t send a lot of CC data to the Tempest, it just doesn’t respond to it. But you can send some (eg mod, pitch) and you have a lot of flexibility in how you configure MIDI notes and channels (eg you can stack multiple drum sounds on a single note IIRC). So for odd pattern lengths and polyrhythmic stuff, you can sequence just 1 or 2 drum parts with the OT in parallel with the Tempest’s sequencer. and of course you have the OT’s rather amazing (and under-appreciated) arpeggiator - does anyone know of another piece of gear that lets you plock the arpeggiator by step, or modulate its parameters with the 3 LFOs? WTF 
Conversely, the Tempest has a ton of different musical scales built in (the OT should have this available too) and playing melodic sounds via the pads is just as much fun as playing drum sounds. All the more reason to push Elektron to allow external MIDI triggering of slices or sample slots! Also the fact of 5 envelopes, 2 fast LFOs and an 8-slot modulation matrix on the Tempest is pretty fantastic, you can get really gorgeous tones out of it and by monkeying around with velocity and other MIDI paramters you can make stuff that is simply not possible on the OT or the A4.
^ all that said. Tempest AND octatrack are a really fucking sweet combo.
tempest pads also waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than the rytm’s pads (even though this is about comparing it to the OT) it takes all of 10 seconds to play the tempest to appreciate the ergonomics
in 16 beats mode, what is the smallest beat quantize value? 16ths? 32nds? are triplets an option? if so, what’s the smallest division of triplets?
thanks!