…once ur on the sonic hook…ur doomed…and ur ballpark starts to grow…it’s also nothing but an addiction…and humans tend to addictions…
it takes lot’s of experiences in life and workflow habits to find out there again…
and ot remains one of the best examples of how a single blip can become anything, can be mutated/treated to fulfill a whole piece of music…
knowing ur gear inside out is always the better solution than to buy the next new thing…
simple as that…
hard as that…
agreed. OT doesn’t really need anything else. sure it welcomes accompanying gear but it doesn’t need it.
I always love hearing someone squeeze the max out of a single piece of gear. really impressive. and it tends to lead to a cohesive sound too, by proxy.
If I had to downsize to the absolute essence this would be my peace of mind setup:
peripherals:
Pro’s:
Negatives:
THAT’s the big lesson to learn here…
…some of the best results i ended up with, were made with nothing but a mic and a laptop…
Minus the Heat. And in reality I could happily just use the Op-1/Z combo.
What I find interesting is that I’ve changed the music I listen to based on the gear I’ve now got.
It makes me nervous to have too much gear. I am most productive when I have few resources. This combo works very well for me and I could play a whole live set with it.
Try Bitwig, it gets you a lot closer than Ableton
Doesn’t it need, like, you know…samples? I have seen some Max Marco videos where he does “synthesis” on the OT with white noise and filters etc, but in general, someone somewhere has to make a noise before OT is any use at all
With a little external MIDI control the Digitone can go really far. I use with the Launchpad Pro Mk3, giving me ‘faders’ amongst other performance controls depending on what I’m doing.
MultiMap also: can really push things and I’m only beginning to get my head around that just now - it takes a bit of planning upfront and maybe some voice management but soon you find yourself doing fun things like triggering different drum patches based on the velocity of striking pads. All from a single track.
The “menu divey” functions of the Digitone tend to be the ones I use infrequently. For example, I may initially assign a preset sound to a track, scrolling through a long list of sounds; if I’m not satisfied with that sound, I will modify it, rather than finding another sound. Assigning sounds to the pool is a bit divey, but I only tend to assign a few sounds, and I generally do that once at the beginning of the project.
Two extra key presses, a track and page button, to access a particular knob function, might seem menu-divey, but over time the muscle memory kicks in, and the amount of time lost is, IMO, not significant.
Note: I use the DN to compose tracks, not as a live machine. YMMV.
To answer the title of this thread, I think the Digitone is fantastic as a standalone box. I use it without a keyboard controller. It has a no-nonsense USB connection to my computer and is a reliable audio interface.
Few years ago I started making electronic music. I bought a DT and a Nord Lead 4 without knowing anything (or at least anything) about it. I only remembered that I liked the sound oft some presets oft the NL4 when I tried it in a store a few more years ago, without knowing what I did.
With both machines I learned synthesis basics, the rest, other synthesis techniques, I learned from YouTube.
Of course I’d like play around with a subharmonicon, a buchla, a ciat lonbarde, a nice wavetable synth and definitely the synthstrom deluge. But I’m also happy with what I have. I just added the Nord Drum 3p because I wanted to have a device to a device for playing drums with hands.
I’m sometimes thinking about a Microfreak for it’s different keyboard that may allow more expression in playing my instruments. And maybe a Faderfox unit if I need some more direct access in live sets. But both units are not necessary. Everything works fine, is controlled by a Blokas Midihub and summed with a Bluebox which both joined last year. It’s finished. Capable of doing more then enough and still beeing playable.
I hear you.
I also think the DN is the closest sample-free Elektron option to on all-in-one box atm, although it might seem much less complete than the Rytm.
The M:C is not far on my list - the big advantage for me being the knob-per-function aspect. I’m just afraid that the sounds you get from it are too much of the same sonic territory. The DN looks like it has a very wide palette.
What do people who tried both would say about that?
I did this piece by multi-tracking a Roland JU-06 in Ableton, along with drum sounds from the Aly James VProm. I might have used an Empress Reverb on some synth parts.
I use the LPMk3 too. I get “performance macros” by setting up the DN pitch bend, or someother, and then mapping a fader on LPMk3 to that CC message. Great pairing
I personally was not able to coax anything I liked enough from the M:C. It always sounded like an M:C
M:C is quicker to get up and running but also quicker to reveal its very limited sound sculpting abilities. It produces murderous kicks, the hats are shite (imo), the chord machine is a nice workaround for the mono nature of the device but will get boring pretty quickly.
DN is much more versatile, does decent drums (just load up a preset and adjust to taste), and is much more flexible in terms of being polyphonic, sharing voices, unison, etc. It takes longer to get up to speed with everything DN can do but that’s part of the fun. It’s a longer-term investment compared to M:C.
Edit: for sequencing other gear, DN’s midi tracks beat the piss out of M:C. And there’s OB too!
OK, that confirms my semi-assumptions about the M:C.
Pity.
Looks like the DN with an external controller would be the way to go.
But 4 tracks only. For beats, melodies and some atmospheric stuff. That’s a challenge.
I have some gear but my jams are all done with one or two machines. Not enough hands. Mostly just one piece of gear. Maybe two.
Elektron M:C only track
Pioneer SP-16 + SH01a combo
Pioneer SP-16 + SH01a combo (I like this one, not sure why no one else does 
)
Circuit Tracks only
Pioneer SP-16 only
