Just got my order in from Sweetwater and wanted to give quick first impressions.
First some context!
I’ve owned/jammed on just about every Elektron box besides the Monomachine. I have the op-z, I had and sold a deluge. I have both Electribe 2 versions and I’ve had a circuit.
I fell in love with the Elektron sequencing and some of the workflow, the digitakt/digitone are my two favorites, followed by the machinedrum uw and A4.
I think I was in the small minority because my excitement was through the roof when this was first announced. I love to jam on gear, and the more immediate the better. This looked perfect for me, and I was counting down the days till I got to play one.
Initial impressions
Snapping the power adapter attachment into place was seriously infuriating. Took me a good 20 minutes! I thought I might break it at one point, I just couldn’t get it to click! Just a word of warning, someone else commented the same thing.
The learning curve is pretty damn intuitive. There’s a couple of things that take an extra few minutes to learn, and I’m sure as I play and read the manual more, I’ll learn a bunch of new things.
The pads are pretty stiff and not my favorite. Maybe they’ll loosen up after enough play? They’re velocity sensitive which is awesome, but the mk 2 boxes and Digi boxes have such satisfying button presses that these pads can’t compete with. The sequencer buttons are more fun to play and it’s fun playing chromatically.
The knobs feel substantial. Thought they’d be lighter, they feel legit.
It’s really easy to jam with and get wild, and very satisfying to mangle your pattern beyond recognition and reset back to your saved state. The Ctrl all tracks is fun and one of my favorite features on the digitakt/tone. I got some really cool sounding jams fairly easily.
I’m not as excited as individual track scaling as some people but I think that’ll grow on me. Random chance is fun! I thought it would randomly affect things like pitch and other parameters but it seems to just be a on/off trigger chance function.
Not sure how useful this will be for lots of people aside from jamming and fun, but overall I’m into it. Hopefully some features will be added, mainly sample per step. That’ll open it up a ton. This has lots of potential and people will make awesome live performances with it. I hope other model boxes come out eventually, that would be seriously rad.
I haven’t done anything yet like transferring samples or any deep work. Just wanted to give quick impressions!
tl;dr
Lots of fun, very accessible, overall satisfied in my first hour with it.
10/10 excitement/expectations
7.5/10 first hour impressions
Hope this helps anyone!