@sezare56 wow, doesn’t feel that long ago I made that, but it’s been almost a year now. . .
the EFM and TRX machines are basically equal-tempered A440ish, while the sine wave machines are quite different tuning, presumably some sort of arbitrary mathematical logic? I remember reading an old post on the old forum about this but I don’t recall the details.
For the Jingle Bells sine waves I used the sine pitch ramp set to full decay to gain slightly more tuning resolution on the sine wave machines, but my understanding is that the ‘static LFO trick’ could also be used to gain even finer control over the pitch; perhaps enough to achieve a close approximation of equal-tempered A440? I enjoyed having the tuning be quite dodgy in general though - iirc most of my pitches were in a range of 10-40 cents flat from their intended A440 values. My Jingle Bells MD snapshot is freely available if anyone wants to load it up and poke around.
I think it’s very interesting to have access to a ‘tuned’ kit of sounds that have their own kind of temperament as it’s conceptually similar to sampling something like a kalimba or toy piano. Straight-up equal-tempered A440 usually isn’t the kind of thing I’m into so I’m often smooshing tuning around a bit, or I will start with sounds that have a distinct but arbitrary pitch center
but this discussion of MD tuning is a bit tangential to the OP’s stated desire of
I think my experiences have been fairly similar to @finalform’s - both MD and MNM are great at this but in very different ways. To me it’s mainly a matter of whether you want to approach things starting from a tonal/pitched perspective (MNM) or more from a raw sound/texture angle (MD)
with no other gear involved I think MD is a bit more ‘playable’ for this kind of use-case, as it has more individual sounds that can be muted/unmuted, the trig keys can function as a completely customizable keyboard, and it also has control-all/CTR-8P, whereas MNM would benefit greatly from being used with an external controller
Overall the MD feels more like a ‘complete device’ to me, whereas MNM was designed specifically to complement MD and address some of its weaker aspects. MNM is a great drum machine, but so far I’ve gotten more satisfying results using MD as a synth than MNM as a drum machine. MNM voices offer more features and possibilities for detailed sound design, but I think it’s because MD has so much more opportunities for layering - is not a big deal to make a single sound out of 3 tracks on MD, you’ll still have 13 tracks left, but if you use 3 tracks on MNM you’ve already used up half of the voices available