Had my MD for 48hrs now. First observations

Jimmywheel · 2016-02-22T18:28:20.000Z

Really pleased with my £529 Machinedrum.

Have admired from afar for many years. When the price dropped I just had to.

Love the sound and the tweakability of the MD.

Got my head around Parameter locks (thanks to help on here) and can now appreciate just how powerful they are in creating individual patterns.

Don’t yet fully appreciate the sound sculpting and effects possibilities available to me but plan to keep reading and learning.

One thing I am thrilled about (maybe considered sacrilege) is I’ve just set up Drumazon with the Machinedrum controlling the whole unit. I can actually program and run Drumazon as if it were hardware. Sounds fantastic and feels much more realistic (and satisfying) using hardware to program it.

One observation is that when you’re using the CC midi controllers to control external gear, you waste 50% of the knobs by virtue of the fact the first knob is the CC selector whilst the second knob is the value to be moved for that CC. Seems a shame not to have gone for a sub menu system which would have doubled the CC possibilities. The main issue is fear of knocking the first knob whilst tweaking the second. Not a major problem and not really a massive criticism. Just seems a shame.

Overall I’m thrilled and want to see if I can now create unique, mad patterns that might inspire me to complete more full tracks going forward.

Cheers Jamie

poonti · 2016-02-23T00:32:10.000Z

Glad you’re enjoying your MD Jimmy! I’ve used mine to control a Novation Drumstation, and I know what you mean about being careful with the CC knobs - still, it’s fun to use the MD to control other drum machines in addition to the internal machines.

ImNotDedYet · 2016-02-23T07:14:48.000Z

Congrats on the purchase!

I’ve just got a bit more time with mine and am absolutely in love. I’ve always wanted a good drum machine with drum synthesis capabilities, flexible sequencing, ability to sequence MIDI gear, (p-locking CCs is mind boggling) play samples and do live sampling, and this (UW+) does all of that and more. Tonight I messed around sampling a C7 chord from my Rhodes into it, then p-locking pitches, length, volumes, etc. My mind is racing at all the possibilities. (as well as how to now get a sample bank of my Rhodes and Wurlie together and importing it)

LyingDalai · 2016-02-23T10:25:35.000Z

I just received my MD yesterday

Ont the sound side of it : I really like it !
I managed to get some really nice snare sounds out of P-I, and there’s soma wonderful bass.
More than everything, the synthesis is rather easy, understandable.
There is some secret mojo as well : it’s like all tracks together sound better than the sum of each part !!

As one can really mess with the sound globally (Func+parameter is global, lovely idea ! CTR-AL is destructive ! wtf ??) it’s really cool to be able to reload instantly with one hand.
To a lesser extent I like to switch between classic and extended to change the sound.

What I really miss is trigless trigs/locks…
I’ve seen there are workarounds with CTL 8P but still I miss the simplicity of turning a knob and recording in real time what happens to the parameters…
Guess I’ll make do

Resampling is a little bit too lofi territory for me. I mean, it’s cool to be able to do lofi, but I would have like some OT-like quality here.
Still, some easy fun there.

I aim to plug a QuNeo to have pads and hit beats + get some control on important parameters.
And I do believe OT+MD combo brings it to another levels : ARP on drums to get retrigs, microtiming (even if so far I haven’t really felt the need for it)
Guess I’ll try this first, in fact.

jshell · 2016-02-23T15:03:01.000Z

CTRL-AL is destructive. I think that’s it’s point and secret - using ‘mute’ on the CTRL-AL track allows you to effectively freeze the parameters it’s controlling at any point in the sequence, then un-freeze them later.

Mute CTRL-AL and use Function-Classic/Extended to temporarily reset.

You can also remove CTRL-AL destructiveness by clearing its track.

I’ll sometimes put a pattern together and turn it into chaos with a ctrl-al track and like the clean pattern underneath, so I’ll copy and paste the whole pattern and clear the ctrl-al track on one. Or vice versa (make a cool pattern, copy and paste it and add ctrl-al to have variations).

I’m still fairly new to the MD (and Elektron gear in general) and this little trick has helped give me a few extra patterns and variations to use live in an upcoming show where my hands are going to be too busy with other to do much with the MD.

The physical modeling snare has become one of my favorite pieces. The middle part of this upcoming live set really centers around a kit that’s primarily the physical modeling machines. When I transition in to that part, it’s basically just kick and snare and it sounds great. Real easy to use PLocks to give some liveliness to the snare.

That and using the 808-ish machines and gnd-sine to make some Plumbutter / Folktek Matter inspired clicks and cuts style beats.

And setting up an Impulse track to trigger the clock of the Mute Synth II and using the INP-E machine to put envelopes and filters on the MS2 and turn it into a little acid monster.

I should have bought this box years ago.

LyingDalai · 2016-02-23T15:07:14.000Z

""jshell"":

The physical modeling snare has become one of my favorite pieces. The middle part of this upcoming live set really centers around a kit that’s primarily the physical modeling machines. When I transition in to that part, it’s basically just kick and snare and it sounds great. Real easy to use PLocks to give some liveliness to the snare.

I’ll have to try your tricks
Thx mate.
And yes, I love this “physical modeling”. With plocks it feels so great, hitting hard !
I love it !

kisielk · 2016-02-27T16:17:35.000Z

I was going to make a separate thread about this but since it’s already being talked about here…

Is the CTL-AL machine also supposed to be destructive when it comes to plocks? I expected if I plocked some settings on it all the other machines would change for that step only, but it seems that even after the plocked step they are affected. I guess I am misunderstanding something?

LyingDalai · 2016-02-27T22:19:26.000Z

Indeed they are destructive.
So far I use them (and Shift+ any parameter) after having made sure the kit is saved !
Then you can mute CTRL-AL and reload the kit (Shift+Extended)