Live Setup Help

Elektron Gear
1

I am in the process of building an Elektron-centered live rig and I would appreciate some advice. I am a guitar player first but I love electronic music and want to build a hybrid setup where I can sing and play acoustic or electric guitar along with my Digitakt 2 providing beats and controlling other synths or Elektron boxes.

I have a Subsequent 37, an OBX8 Desktop and a Moog Matriarch but I don’t really want to lug all 3 to perform. I would like to keep a small but flexible rig that can cover a lot of sounds and styles. My style leans ambient with 80s synth influence. I have a Timeline, Big Sky, and Polyend Mess for effects. I’m considering:

  1. Tonverk as my melodic instrument. I could multi sample all my synths and pair it with the DT2 for bass and drums. Downside: price and latency issues. Device is still relatively young & updates are unknown.

  2. AstroLab 37 to pair with the DT2 for all kinds of synth tones. It also has a chord mode. I could mono sample some of my current synths with the DT2 and gain a lot of sounds in a small and relatively affordable instrument. Downside: no multi or polyphonic sampling.

  3. DN2 with DT2. Both can do drum and melodic sounds and control external devices. Less expensive than TV but loses the extended sampling capabilities. I’m also not familiar with the chord mode and whether it can be applied to MIDI controlled devices.

Right now I’m leaning toward option 1 or 2 but I’m open to suggestions. Thoughts?

2

Keep it simple? You have 16 stereo tracks in the DT2 already. Why would you need more?

Edit: what would make sense to me to add would be a small portable mixer with mic/guitar inputs and some basic FX like an L6max (it can also record your live performances) unless you already have that covered

2 Likes
3

If you don’t want additional expenses, you could just take one of those synths (whichever you prefer to play live) and pair it with DT2, which is still very capable sampler, unless you really need multi sampling. But unless you need something like authentic sounding playable piano in there I don’t think it’s that important feature.

4

Hi. Frankly, I have no clue what your music sounds like.

If you take a look at your songs, I think the questions should rather be:

  • which parts of the songs are good to be performed live and which parts can be played back e.g. by the DT2.
  • and which instruments would be needed to perform these parts.

Having no clue of your song structure, I guess I would pick the DT2 and the Subsequent 37. They’re good to go for the road. One for playing back stems and drums and the Moog to perform when not triggered by MIDI.