I paid £650 all in on eBay and i accepted that included a small premium vs waiting and hoping to get one direct. With the exchange rate dive and price hike it could fluctuate quite a bit from that to be honest. Not saying it’d hit £740 but if looking to cover eBay fees too then could see it getting most of the way there
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it depends where you’re located but its worth checking out craigslist. i found mine for under retail basically brand new a few miles out of seattle. do they do craigslist in europe i dunno
That’s very broad. If you just mean using wavetables, here’s a short guide from the community google doc :
For working w/ single-cycle waveforms loaded in the same file, if I set the mode to OSC, how does M8 know the size of each waveform (is there a setting I can use, or should I use slices?)
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The LENGTH parameter requires you to know how many samples waveforms there are in the file and set it.
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So if there are 16 waveforms in the file:
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Set the LENGTH to 10 (10 in hex = 16 in decimal)
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Increase the LOOP START by increments of 10 to jump to each waveforms.
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If that’s not what you mean, can you be more specific?
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I have a MIDI file full of chords that I use with plugins/synths (including Wavestation and a few other romplers) in order to render long chains of many different chord shapes. Of course it’s very different to having a true polyphonic synth, but it means that I have some nice chords ready to go when I need them. And since the format is the same for each sound that I’ve exported, I can switch things out and the slice numbers match the same chord shapes.
Re-creating D-50/Wavestation style synthesis on M8 isn’t really possible due to the amount of layering required.
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Sample those synths and import into M8.
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Reminds me of Barker’s file:
@johnl I have a video somewhere explaining the basics of @Abhoth’s OctaChainer to create chains. Workflow for M8 is similar but you would choose the grid mode.
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Yep, I definitely stole the idea from Barker 
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thanks for the link to the barker file! just set up my own twist on it and its making sampling such a breeze this is great
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In terms of FM synths, if we compare the M8 and the DN, which one do you think is more powerful/versatile ?
Can you do things with the M8’s FM synth that you can’t with the DN, and vice-versa ?
Would it be overkill to have both or could it be justified in some ways ?
I would say DN is more powerful, they are both 4op so I guess can produce similar sounds but I’m no expert. DN has polyphony, a more user friendly set of controls, more LFO routing options, you have oscillator envelopes for free whereas on the M8 you need to dedicate one of your two available envelopes… that said the M8 FM is pretty impressive for a handheld device!
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Thanks for your reply. Same as you, I’m not an expert, but I thought that you could use M8’s tables to have more enveloppes/lfos. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but I thought that you could “configure” a table to behave like pretty much whatever you want (arp, lfo, enveloppe, plocking fx…). If that’s the case, then it seems the M8 have more modulation options, no ?
Yeah that’s true actually! I’ve not gone too deep into tables yet. They’re a bit fiddly compared to a regular LFO or envelope but could definitely yield some powerful results. I really need to learn FM in general better, I think I might check out Dave Mech’s course as I’m a total noob really
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BTW do you know about headless M8? It’s a great way to try it out if you’re curious. You just need a Teensy board (like £35 in the UK) and an SD card to get started (plus a computer to use for the display and sound). It’s pretty straightforward to set up and works great - that’s what I’m using right now (I’ve just got a handheld gaming device to use as the screen to make it portable but it’s actually great on the computer with a bigger screen too)
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I just got a Machinedrum, at last, and sampled it in the M8 where I sliced it and re-sequenced it.
Here’s an IDM track I made with it.
There’s also a lot of FM from the internal M8 synth. I had a blast slicing the Machinedrum loops with the M8. The drums sound incredible in my opinion, and the M8 sequencing on top of that is bonkers.
There are also some weird FM patches I created with the M8 for this, a bit subby, a bit resonant. I sequenced the FM modulators to get those gritty bass associated with a higher pitched top note.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
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This sounds amazing, great idea to sample in the MD
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not a polyphony expert, but I think if you set more than one tracks with the same instrument on the m8 you can polyphony on it as well
Thank you, yes sequencing an MD loop in the M8 is just great. I’m having a blast!
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Ah right yeah, but you need to manually spread the notes over the two tracks I assume?
I’m currently on headless due to lack of stock so no audio in, but I might see if I can hook my audio interface to headless and sample my MD this weekend, great idea!
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I have not tried it but based on the manual if you set the incoming midi to “poly” it will play tracks on the same midi channel round robin. So you’d create an instrument/patch and copy it to multiple tracks and incoming midi notes will cycle through the tracks on each key press. Things get interesting when you make minor adjustments to each instrument so there is variation per note/voice played. This is similar to something like the mondovox or midipal/midigal but in the box.