As I wait patiently for it to arrive, I’ve been trying to get a better idea of how the Monomachine’s reverb will sound. It appears some people like it, and others don’t. What are your favorite ways of using it? Also, how are the other effects? Is the chorus anything like the one on the A4? I think I actually prefer the Monomachine’s delay to the A4/RYTM’s. I also prefer the Monomachine’s sample rate reduction to the RYTM’s bit rate reduction. I’m also curious about the Monomachine’s Phaser.
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I am not very impressed by MM effects, but I use two Eventide pedals to one of MmM outputs so it cannot really compete.
Maybe it needs some taming.
So far I think that OT effects are better, and A4 the best.
But this makes me figure I rely too much on external effects to say I really know MM ones.
I have to experiment with them.
MM delay is rather good, it’s nice to have both LP and HP filters. Plus it’s one different delay per track, so you can get crazy with your six delays !
SRR is really better than AR, I confirm.
And it’s very nice to have some EQ at the end of the signal.
Key thing is : be patient with the MM !
At first you may find it hard to tame : you can go from pristine to muddy in one tiny turning of a knob !
I suggest you load LEM’s soundpack and analyze how he configured every kit, it’s a very good school.
yep a very great feature, somehow lost in translation on later machines 
The delay is awesome, though the lack of “wet only” feature is a bit disappointing (ie. to use it to fake micro-timing).
The reverb isn’t very good, but might be useful in certain situations. It’s definitely not “lush” like the A4 reverb.
I’m not a big fan of the SRR on the monomachine… it’s not dirty enough. I was expecting something that could go right down to 0, with no interpolation, and keytrackable so it could sound like oldschool trackers with their lo-fi sample pitching. Alas, while it has keytracking, it never works in the way I want.
The Dynamix effect is great, it’s a bit of a weird compressor but once you find the sweet spots it’s good for pumping up your tracks a little.
I haven’t used any of the other effects yet; I really should get on to that! I’ve had the monomachine for almost a year and there’s so much I haven’t tried on it.
I honestly find the reverb to be the worst effect on the unit. While it can be useful in some cases, it’s really disappointing. It’s really hard to sculpt a good sound out of it. If i were going to use something on the MnM in a studio track, I’d probably do it dry and then add reverb in my DAW or from another pedal I have.
Right, slicetwo : with a Space on the output it really shines !!
It’s a shame to hear the consensus is unfavorable; I was thinking it could be useful after filtering out the lows & highs. I guess that’s why I never see/hear anyone using it.
Nice. I have a Hall of Fame pedal. It’s on a chain that goes Red Panda Particle - TC Alter Ego Delay - TC Corona Chorus - TC HoF Reverb. It’s actually my vocal performance rig, but it works great for synth fx in the studio.
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Agree on all these points… the delay has this subtle tapey pitch warble that gently juices stuff up in a nice way but won’t mess with timing, and being able to cut out the high or low end opens up some rhythmic possibilities.
I actually think the reverb is great… not so much as a straight up lush reverb but as a fake snare or just a splash of blur. I’m starting to think of it more as just a resonant body than a simulation of space.
The chorus is nice, runs the gamut of chorus sounds from smooth watery 80s tones and trippy pitch modulation.
I like the ringmod too. I want to explore it more. I’ve used it to turn kind of bland sine/triangle waves into conga-like modal tones.
Haven’t played with the flange or phase yet.
Agree on all these points… the delay has this subtle tapey pitch warble that gently juices stuff up in a nice way but won’t mess with timing, and being able to cut out the high or low end opens up some rhythmic possibilities.
I actually think the reverb is great… not so much as a straight up lush reverb but as a fake snare or just a splash of blur. I’m starting to think of it more as just a resonant body than a simulation of space.
The chorus is nice, runs the gamut of chorus sounds from smooth watery 80s tones and trippy pitch modulation.
I like the ringmod too. I want to explore it more. I’ve used it to turn kind of bland sine/triangle waves into conga-like modal tones.
Haven’t played with the flange or phase yet. [/quote]
There is hope for the reverb then… I’d actually most likely want to use it as a room style reverb for percussion & shorter sounds all the time anyhow.
Yeah what I’d recommend is just using the track effects on it, a little filtering or even srr/distortion make it more interesting. Also sequence it like a drum track and take advantage of the LFOs and envelopes.
I totally forgot that you can use all the track effects when you assign Reverb to a track. With 3 LFOs, and all those parameters, I’m confident I’ll find some good use out of the reverb now.
i find that MnM effects come into their own primarily as sound shaping tools. lean on them too heavily and their limits can show, but use them subtly and judiciously and they can warm up your sound.
add a couple of effect tracks to your kit, put them on their own bus, run the synth lines through the buses, and employ the multiple delays you now have in the chain along with the effects themselves … nice lush results.
also, some of the effects sound great with particular synth voices but lousy with others (to my ears anyway). what i’d pair with a digipro ensemble chord line i’d avoid with bbox percussion, for example.
and as license mentions, sequencing and plocking the effects tracks is a great way to keep them under control.
maybe the key takeaway is, don’t expect them to replace high quality plugins or standalone processors, but they work nicely as thickening agents.
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I think my understanding of effect machines might be a little off. When reverb is assigned to a track, is there any way to route only the reverb through the track effects (i.e. have SRR affect only the reverb and not the sound being routed to the reverb)?
Yes, its possible to keep the reverb machine wet only and therefore only the reverb would be affected. And the dry sound would still be mixable.
Ok, cool. The effects routing seemed pretty comprehensive when I glanced over the manual.
yeah very true. I’ve had some luck with using a Behringer RV600 pedal as a send reverb, assigned to a pair of outputs… it’s good for those lush 90s IDM sounds I like to make on the MnM 
damn, I really want to get going on the monomachine again after reading this thread! I’ve spent the last couple of months digging into nanoloop and TE products so the MnM hasn’t had much attention.
On the reverb, turn the damp up to at least ~30-40. Under that, it just sounds really fake and bad. You can turn up the decay or overall volume to hear the reverb more that it is damped down a bit.
I finally reunited with the MM yesterday, and I love it so much. I’ve owned this thing several times before, but haven’t touched one in nearly a decade. The crazy thing is I never played with the effects machines until now.
First thing I played with was the reverb, and I think it is awesome. I get why a lot of people might not like this reverb, but I really enjoy its character. It doesn’t sound real/lush, but I think its a good quality reverb especially for percussion. I was kind of expecting it to be as bad as the reverb on the Electribe EMX/ESX from people’s descriptions, but it has a much smoother sound, and can actually impart an interesting sense of space.
I didn’t immediately bond with the compressor, but I definitely need to experiment more with it. I’m hoping to be able to get some nice sidechaing effects out of it by parameter locking the threshold.
The delay is great. I thinks it’s the best sounding delay Elektron has ever created. It sounds really really good to me.
Anyhow, these are just a few of my initial impressions I wanted to share after briefly messing with it last night.
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I still don’t entirely get compressors but I used the Monomachine’s a lot on a recent song I did on the Monomachine. I set it up as my ‘track 6’ master effect and ran all the other tracks through it. I was able to add some nice flavor to the signal, but I really had a lot of fun when I started using trigless locks on the compressor track to play with its envelope. I initially wanted to try to get some sidechaining sounds out of it but had more fun when I realized I could get some stuttering sounds out of it (since I was suddenly quickly muting and unmuting all of the sounds before it). This could probably be done with any of the effects but it worked really well with compressor.
The Monomachine’s per-track, p-lockable delay has become my favorite feature of the Monomachine. I think it and the Octatrack are the only two Elektron boxes that can do this per track, right? Every other box has a global delay (with Rytm being the only one I haven’t used).
You can do tuned (and untuned) delay synthesis with that thing. I love this sound so much right now and Monomachine makes it so easy to turn the delay into an instrument with its easily accessible and sequencable parameters. Join those with the three LFOs and how many LFO parameters you can change per step (much more than Octatrack), and it’s … it’s why it’s my favorite.
This is playing with some of that delay to do pseudo-physical-modeling. Reverb is via A4, everything else is Monomachine (using some FM custom single cycle waveforms in the DigiPRO engines via the Adventure Kid waveform library, I think).
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