Hi everyone, apologies for the long first post!
I’ve been reading this forum for a while and found it invaluable - Especially in helping me towards solving the problem I’m facing. I figured this was specific enough to ask for some advice. I’ve thought this through a lot but can’t make up my mind.
In the last year, I’ve been lucky to pick up a DT and learned how to use it/push it as much as possible, I love making music with it. If I had to keep one thing in my studio, I’d stick with the Digitakt.
My goal is to build a flexible setup that works for writing music at home, both for my own techno/ebm/industrial-ish stuff, plus more ambient and experimental music.
However, most of the music I make is with my post-punk band - We’re (slowly) writing a new LP and incorporating drum machine and synth parts alongside our setup of drums/bass/guitar and vocals. I’m the guitarist in the band, and currently switch between playing electronics and guitar - sometimes both in the same song. We also play live/tour a fair bit (pre pandemic) so whatever we use has to work for writing/recording and touring.
over the last few months I’ve also added a DN, which I’m still learning but feel as connected to as the DT, and an A4mkII. The A4 is also great, a bit of a deeper dive than the other two and works well for the ambient/weird music I make, but I can’t really get it to make the sounds I want for my band or the harder techno-based music.
One of the reasons I got the A4 was to have a song mode and performance controls, to free me up from the electronics when I’m playing guitar. Sometimes I’m going to want to just hit play and let the song happen, with the odd parameter tweak here and there. I’ve tried some setups of all 3 doing this and it works, but I’m still struggling to sequence whole songs easily or in quite the way I want.
My current MIDI setup is A4 -> DT -> DN. At home, audio is either sent from DT -> DN -> A4 -> headphones, or each separately in to a mixer if I want an FX send (Line6 HX Stomp for techno, although this is my guitar FX in the band).
Here’s the problem I’m facing:
Do I a) Admit defeat with the A4, sell it + the DT and ‘upgrade’ to an OTmkII. I think the OT does everything I need - possibly better. An OT + DN setup is clean, simple to move around and one less box to worry about on the road. For some live stuff, streaming out a whole backing track would be sick. I could possibly even route a click out to the drummer from the OT.
Or do I b) stick with what I’ve got knowing that I have a huge amount of fun with the DT + DN, and push myself to figure out the A4 as a master ‘song controller’. I know if I work hard enough at it, I can find some sounds in the A4 that might work for me.
I want to say again here, I love the DT workflow and I’d be sad to lose all the bits of projects I’ve built up so far. However, if OT + DN is the way to go, I could live with moving samples across and remaking my sequences.
I know the OT is a steep learning curve, but I have a decent background in music tech (I work in a university setting in this area) so I can put the time in and learn it.
TL;DR - Do I trade my DT + DN + A4 for OT + DN? I would really miss the DT a lot, but will I like the OT more?
Thanks for reading. Let me know your experiences and what you think!
R