Elektron Monomachine Filters Quality & resonance

What is the quality of the filters on the elektron monomachine? Compare to A4 ? Is there a control for the resonance? In the manual there is LPQ (low pass filter Q) controls how much the volume is boosted around the low-pass cut off frequency. Why not call this resonance from elektron ? thanks

The Monomachine filters are great but the initial gain of your waveform makes a big difference.
I dont have an A4 but it is analog so will be different to Mono digital filter.
Q (quality) means resonance.

The filters are very different to those on the A4. Where those on the A4 react as you would imagine, the filters on the MnM (especially the resonance) is a little unpredictable and dirty sounding. It’s very easy to get a distorted / crunchy sound at high Q settings that sounds great if you’re after that vibe. It’s a lot harder to get smooth sounds at high Q settings, then have to start turning down the gain staging to compensate.

What makes the Monomachine a bit « unpredictable » as said above is that a small change of the value of a parameter can have a large effect.
Resonance is not very playable, IMO, but there might be a sweet spot when tweaking gain staging I haven’t found.
Thing is, you don’t get the Monomachine for its filters : they are just a small portion of this unequaled synth.

Yeah, the filter is a tool on the MM. It’s not “ooh, what a lovely sounding filter”, it’s a way to get all kinds of different sounds out of it when LFOd/p-locked/sliding/etc. I made quite a nice electric piano-ish sound the other night with quite a lot of LPF Q on a SID machine (IIRC), though.

My favourite filter trick on the monomachine is to keep HPF tracking on, and set the filter base to 8 or 16, with a mid/high Q. Since the filter is keytracked, you get a nice bass boost that (kinda) warms the sound up.

But yeah, as others have said, it’s temperamental/unpredictable, but I love it for that. It’s not creamy, it’s not smooth, it doesn’t do “analog” well, but holy shit it sure is unique. Great for making fucked up digital acid.

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Do you recommend removing the filter tracking?

Same on A4

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Totally depends on what you want to achieve.

A lot of people will say that they always turn off the HPF tracking immediately on every sound they create, but it’s really down to what you want to make it do. Try it and see what works. Even on a bass sound - if you want to make filter Q a part of the nature/character of the tone, you might want to key track it, if you just want to boost the bottom end generally around a certain frequency you might not.

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Not without hearing what it actually does and how it impacts your sound design.

Obviously for the super sharp FM stuff, or the drum kit, it’s best to turn LPF tracking off (and the HPF as well for drums). The BASE setting (HPF) is actually something like two octaves below the fundamental frequency when keytracking is on, so it shouldn’t actually suck bass out of the sounds unless you’re tuning your FM operators super low or doing some trickery with custom waves longer than the standard length (is this possible? haven’t tried).

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