Great post @Open_Mike never having been in a band myself I found that very interesting 
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Since you have been in a band and have also made the move to electronic music how do you find the differences? Did you have a different opinion of electronic music (1 man band) before you got into it? Is the whole misconception that electronic music is “all made on computers” or just pushing buttons still as prevalent amongst more traditional musicians these days do you think?
Ya know, that’s a great question and I’ll have to give it some time to respond with a thoughtful answer… And I will at some point…
For now I will say that on the forum I seem to meet people in the very specific detail about the machines we are talking about, but if we take a step back to workflow, etc…, I do feel like my general outlook on using these devices to make music starts to diverge…
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I understand your point, but each of those players, except bass has many voices playing at the same time, and drummer alone tends to have 3 different “sound engines”/tracks playing at the same time: kick, snare and hat/various cymbals.
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But you wouldn’t replace a drummer with a monophonic synth, you would use a drum machine in this analogy which is in itself a collection of voices
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That is a good point…
I do mostly looping so I guess I usually see one guitar loop for example as a track…
They are definitely two different worlds with lots of similarities and lots of differences, which are getting more blurry as new tech and new types of artists come out and things are intermingled…
At this point I’m just left pondering it all, but I like it… 
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first the people cry for more polyphony, second they cry for more features, third they beg for even more features … and then we end up with what’s called a workstation - which is anything but fun and intuitive!
i like the restrictions the Elektron machines have. they force you to use what you have and this increases creativity to a level no complicated feature filled machine would ever elicit from me. technically there can be much more than what we have. most definitely. but less is more - the older you get, the more you will get to appreciate this simple matter of fact!
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hello there, from now on i have :
octatrack : 8voices 8 track
analog four : 4 / 4
blofeld : 25 /16
korg er-1 :8 / 8
digitone : 8 /4
yamaha RM1x : 32 /16
monologue : 1 / 1
po-32: 4/16
computer : ??? / unlimited ???
let’s do the math 90 voice polyphony / 73 tracks.
to be honest i never used all the voice tracks at the same times, it’s the sum of it all i guess !
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this! fantastic post @Open_Mike
and, to add to this: its a matter of fact that the more stuff you put into a track, the less prominent all the individual pieces get, because our brain can only process so much at the same time. less is more 
Having come from a band background as well, I think this is pretty spot on. In the end I feel it’s about the interplay between the voices, whatever their origin, rather than the layering of them that makes for interesting music (generally speaking - definitely not a one-size-fits-all blanket statement)
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I was responding to another user comparing four tracks on digitone to four member bands
Yes, that’s what I was referring to. Though I guess I did expand the analogy
Sorry I’ve left you hanging on this. It’s proven to be a very difficult question for me without writing a book about it, which I almost started to…
There’s a lot of differences between playing as a member of a band and producing electronic music…
Maybe I’ll get around to an answer, if you were here I’d talk about it for quite awhile to fully describe my feelings, but it would take a lot of writing…
In general though for your “button pushing” question, the jury is still out. I know plenty of musicians that don’t think highly of electronic producers, and I also know plenty who are really wanting to learn more about it and go that direction themselves. Many of the musicians around here would probably rather go dance to a bumping hot dj or electronic act than a mediocre band, but an excellent band they would prefer. The mixing of the two seems to get a good amount of interest from both sides, and that’s the direction I’m pursuing…
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I’m not Open_Mike, but I did spend many years writing music in bands before getting into electronic production.
I agree with his central point that coming from a band background can cause you to look differently at production tools. Something like the Analog 4 - when you compare it to the infinite tracks in a DAW, it seems painfully limited. How could I produce a track with just 4 voices?!! But then compare it to a string quartet; centuries of music made with 4 monophonic voices, and still going. Then you realise you face a different challenge; how do I give each voice the distinct presence and personality and melodic/harmonic ingenuity that it deserves?
In a string quartet, or a band, there’s a human being making a decision about how to approach every single note that is played. It’s actually an incredibly fast way to get good music! Each player is constantly adjusting, trying variations, and using their judgment to improve every aspect of the playing – articulation, tone, volume, harmonic variations… If the players are good, there’s a process of the song learning itself in a sense. There’s a reason good electronic music tends to be fundamentally pretty minimal in the number of tracks used – the composer’s brain can only handle a certain amount of complexity, and if the elements are fewer they’ll be able to make more considered decisions about each track rather than using boring, generic elements just to fill in the mix.
So I agree with those suggesting that we don’t really need more power, because the instruments we have are already too powerful for us to use usefully. Using a DAW to sequence music is like using a supercomputer to play Pacman in some ways. The one place more DSP seems to be really useful is in FX imho, and in some interesting branches of synthesis like physical modelling.
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what i´d like to know:
the processors used in DT and DN, whats the price for such thing ?
how much beefier processors has the market and whats that price ?
and as we are on it:
lets say somebody would want to programm a “enhanced” DT from scratch.
How many people would it take ? for how much months ? what salary would such (capable) people have to get ?
very interested to get some numbers together.
Don’t forget, piano players appreciate lots of polyphony.
These are not generic processors that you find in computers and smartphone,these are dsp for digital signal processors,the thing is realtime processing is more demanding because you can’t have lantency on a musical instrument, therefore i don’t Know the price but for What i’ve read the old boxes ( md & mm ) have 2 dsp hence the steep price.
yes, i was under the opinion that these are DSPs.
no further clue on these things.
no clue if a DSP is even comparable to the generic processors in regards to cicle power.
but to know prices would be interesting. i mean the range we´re spekaing here.
is it more like 50$ per DSP or more like 400$ as it was IIRC back in the day with the Virus and the sharc ?