MD Losing Sync with Ableton in Slave

Elektron Gear Machinedrum
#1

My Machinedrum is going out of sync when slaved to Ableton. It runs perfectly in sync for about 5 minutes but then it starts to slow down gradually until it reaches a point where it stops and doesn’t react for about 30 seconds. After that, it syncs up perfectly again and lasts for another 5 minutes like this. When I set it to Internal Sync, it works perfectly without any variations all day long. I bought it used 5 days ago. It seems to me that before installing X.10 at least in the initial tests this didn’t happen. I installed X.10 yesterday and it’s been doing this now.

Since I’ve just bought it, I don’t know if it’s related to the update or if there was already something wrong with the machine from the start. Have any of you experienced this? What can I do to overcome this problem?

#2

Slave it to a different clock source (like other hardware) other than Ableton and if it drifts after 5 minutes as it does now, then the problem is probably with the MD itself. If it stays in sync to a different clock without drifting, then the problem is probably something in the communication between Ableton and the MD. Beyond that, I don’t know.

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#3

The strange thing is that this happened yesterday. Today i turned on my computer from zero and the problem stopped!! Maybe is my computer reboot??

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#4

It’s difficult to say when it’s an issue that can’t be reproduced, usually this kind of problem is because the hardware is on it’s own clock and the transport is only being controlled by the computer/external control. Your issue is strange because you said it went out of sync, stopped, then went back in sync all by itself. I think from the way you’re describing it, where a reboot changed the behavior, the problem is more likely on the sending end. Just with so little other corroborating information it’s really impossible to know for certain.

If you know that you have both clock and transport synced and this doesn’t happen again, I would guess it was on the computer end. If this becomes an issue later today or at another time, try the act of slaving it to a different clock source like I suggested before, I think by doing that you’ll be able to narrow down whether the issue is specific to the MD or not. That’s my best advice with so little information, I’m not familiar with this being a problem for anyone else who updated FW like you did, but I’m not an expert or anything so can’t say for sure.

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#5

thanks a lot!

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#6

No problem, hope it works out for you. If not then maybe someone else will see this and have an opinion but let’s assume for now that it was an isolated thing and just needed a reset for some reason. Even if it happens again, if that ends up being the fix and it doesn’t happen very often, at least that’s easier to do that than to figure out a problem that happens every time you use it. Good luck!

#7

i always seem to have trouble with this kind of thing, i would set it up as with md as the clock source/master and then abletons tempo would slightly drift and do weird things like that. if you’re setup requires it you can fiddle with it to make it unnoticeable, but these days i go a different route and sync things together manual like a dj would beatmatch records. actually pretty easy with the md because you can nudge it using left and right arrows while its playing. (for example set the tempo on both the md and ableton to the same, try to press play at the same time and play a click to see how close they are, then nudge the md back into time (ableton can be nudged too))

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#8

great advice! thanks!