This is great! That bass synth sounds so good, is that Chiral? I really like how the track builds, the climax is so satisfying.
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glad that folks love their M8 but honestly, when I tried out a friendâs M8, could not groove with it. I like the larger keys and interface on my SP 404 MK2 better. Just me tho.
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Thank you! I actually streamed almost the whole process so Iâd say 16 to 20 hours.
The stream is on my YouTube channel but itâs in french for once sorry 
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Thank you! Visuals are from Micah Buzan, and I just played with the colors and some visual distortions!
Thank you! No, the bass synth is the FM synth with a lot of modulation. It comes from laamaa track âbullet trainâ I believe, a lot going on in the tables and Iâm heavily changing the logo rate and modulation. But yes it sounds massive!
Chiral is the little plucks you hear in the beginning and throughout the song.
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You really have to dig in and grind a bit to get the most out of it. Once you get the flow, it becomes more straightforward to build stuff up. The folks that sample loops off other gear seem to have the best time (I havenât done a lot of this myself). Sound design from scratch is pretty interesting on the M8, though - tons to dive into between all the internal synths, filters, modulation etc. Again, it does take a decent amount of time to figure out what theyâre all good at. You can get lost in the sauce with those synths, too (especially the FM synth and Wavsynth) which is both good and bad.
I do find my melodies and rhythms tend to be kind of samey on it. You have a limited number of patterns, but theyâre easy to transpose in a phrase, and itâs also easy to make pattern variations. That leads, at least for me, to a certain flow that can get a little boring. I tend to crave more of the kind of happy accidents you get from looser workflows. For more detailed, intentional, progression-oriented stuff like EDM or drum and bass, it makes more sense.
The SP404 is a lot more hands-on, which is the main thing the M8 is missing. The Elektron boxes might be a sweet spot between those two.
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All good points. My take on the M8 or tracker based programming in general is that is not really comparable to any other method of programming/playing music. I come from an instrument âplaying/jammingâ background. So using the M8 for me is more of a brain exercise. I feel like its similar to Sudoku as far as healthy brain exercise. I enjoy programming on the M8 but its nothing like laying down a beat on a Roland drum machine and sequencing/live sequencing synths parts. For me, so far, its replaced doom scrolling on my phone more than anything, which I have a mild addiction with. But as far as replacing my tradition ways of jamming and recording instruments, itâs just an entirely different beast. Very pleased with my purchase but my Digitakt, guitar, and various synths will continue to be my primary tools for making music.
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Worth pointing out that the innovation in Elektron-style sequencers like the DT is the integration of tracker-style per-step programming into a roland-style step-based form factor.
The tracker âspreadsheetâ is just a list of each step with itâs âlocksâ written next to it. Or, to go in the other direction, the a DT is just a spreadsheet with each row hidden behind having to hold down a trig and see the locks it holds.
So theyâre really not as conceptually different from one another as it first appears. Though their drastically different interfaces (seeing all locks and and intuiting steps vs. seeing steps and intuiting locks) encourages us to approach each differently.
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Agreed. I should mention that I am a minority in that I donât use tools like the Digitakt as most users do. I typically only use live record for everythingâŚI finger drum my beats in, use the keyboard mode to play all melodies and such. I donât use trig locks and all of that so for me the M8 is more of taking a break from my go to playing style of recording. Although it seems most use the M8 for programming songs, I am finding it more enjoyable to use it for making complex noises with no song format.
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agree and hands on immediate is what I wanted hence the love for the SP404 MK2! I love use it with small portable modular they fit well together.
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Apologies if this was already posted, (I looked a bit, and didnât see it, but didnât do an exhaustive search).
This video is pretty amazing. Iâm still a bit in disbelief by the 303 line later in the video.
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Question to M8 owners: How can I make instrument tables run slowly, especially without them to be retriggered with every note? Iâm quite frustrated by constantly failing in this regard. My aim is to have a table (or at least one column) that runs longer than over the course of just one phrase.
you can adjust TIC on the instrument page. This will slow down or speed up the table.
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Set it to 00 and it will only advance one row every time a note is triggered. You canât make them completely ignore notes, IIRC.
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Nope, doesnât work if TIC is slower than new notes occur. I currently have one note per phrase (at row 0) and TIC set to C0, which equals two phrases. This results in the table stalling at itâs row 0, because it is retriggered with every note/phrase.
Thatâs bad. So thereâs no way to have an instrument paramater set to a different value only once in a while? Canât think of an alternative method.
Specifically, i want to alter the LF3 at every other phrase (or even sparse). Just alter between two values, without having to change it within a ton of different phrases.
I wish we had effects columns in chain viewâŚ
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Youâve got a few options.
AUX tables donât restart on instrument triggers, so thatâs that.
Or NTH to have the LF3 happen every x occurance of a phrase in a chain.
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AUX tables unfortunately (although I understand why this is) donât provide instrument related parameters, of which LF3 is one.
NTH doesnât work either. As soon I set it other than 00, the associated command wonât have any effect at all.
Edit: The statement given above regarding aux tables is clearly wrong, as Iâve learned later on!
If that is the case, and there is only one note every phrase, I would have expected a Tic00 instrument table to work if it were set up like this:
LF300
(Empty)
LF380
(Empty)
Etc.
How is it behaving in that case?