I’ve owned the M8 multiple times, and I’m tempted to get one again. The weird thing is I have a strange issue with the M8’s sound quality despite everyone’s praises. When I loaded up the same drum samples to it and other samplers, I found there’s a bit of a “congested” sound to the M8.
I currently own an OP-XY, and wish it had more modulation and FX, but I definitely prefer how samples sound coming out of it compared to the M8.
Agreed, the OP-XY sounds huge and crisp, so does the KO II, albeit less crisp and more full and warm. I’ve said it before, but it’s the stuff TE do under the hood that you don’t really see that makes their devices so fun, fast, and musical.
I’m blown away how good the synths on the M8 are.
I think the key to get good sound designs from OPXY synths is same as on OPZ. Record modulations of the parameters live and combine it with LFO. For me personally I don’t care too much about stem export or multichannel audio. I think second LFO is a must and something I hope will be added in a next firmware. And more engines.
100 % agree a second LFO will increase sound possibilities a lot.
Who are those people exactly? I personally think both of these machines are great and have been using them side by side. I also think the M8 has a much higher learning curve which can make it a pain for a lot of people to put the time into. The OPXY seems a lot more immediate.
That said, both machines require a lot of time with the synths. There are people who get some really nice sounds out of the opxy synths, does that mean everyone else is not getting it?
It’s good for TE to have some sort of competition in the portable marketspace. It will benefit everyone when it comes to firmware updates. The OPXY could become a complete monster in the next 18 months if the bug squashing is pretty much complete.
I find them to be pretty similar because they are both 8 track handheld devices with substantial battery life. They both sample, have synths and are capable of arranging full tracks. Most people looking at the best handheld devices on the market are going to end up narrowing it down to 1 of them. Plus they can be used in tandem with just 1 USBC cable.
A lot of the time I see tracker advocates telling someone to buy the M8 but when the person in question says they want something with a keyboard they can play live on the M8 folks insist that it’s totally fun to play live and revolutionized their life. It’s not at all a controversial take that trackers are not for everyone and just don’t work with a lot of peoples’ process.
I agree it’s a great device with lots of cool features, good sound, etc, but trackers are compositional instruments more than grooveboxes to jam on live and a lot of people just don’t want that, they want something that they can easily live record minimally quantized performance with some expressive velocity sensitivity alongside their sequenced patterns. The XY or even the lofi 12xt address that style of groovebox use in a much more direct way than the M8. It’s horses for courses but I don’t think the XY and the M8 are even playing the same sport.
My thing with the op xy synths is that they’re not bad enough that they sound weird and quirky. They’re currently mostly of the analogue synth emulation flavour, but I think to do analogue synthesis really well digitally you actually need quite lot of DSP to give it grit, weight and character. Currently it sounds a bit limp to me. I’d love it if they just go full digital and come up with something wacky that isn’t really trying to be analogue. Good fm, better wavetable, even a simple GM midi player would be fun.
That’s why you say that a great companion for the OP-XY (and in general) is the Analog Heat+FX… Elektron’s most underrated piece of equipment.
tbh if the op-xy only had the wavetable synth, i would still be into it. the warp parameter on there gets everything sounding like my kinda style.
This has gotten me wanting to dig into the XY’s synths more. Any tips?
the drift parameter in the wavetable synth makes the patch sound pretty gnarly when maxed out
so am I crazy or can you not assign each audio track its own midi channel…?
Been digging thru the manual and google but the only mentions of midi track assignment seem to be when OPXY is in controller mode.
I see the option to set the “active track” midi but I have a mini keyboard with keys and drum pads and I was hoping to assign the drum tracks to the pads while being able to control other tracks with keys.
edit: I wrongly concluded that the midi channels were hardcoded to the track. @jw thank you for introducing me to the project config menu!
Shift + M1 on a instrument track will bring up a menu to turn it into a MIDI track (or another instrument type) not sure if this is what you’re looking for.
No, I’m trying to control the OPXY with an Akai MPK mini plus.
It looks like audio tracks 1-8 are hard coded to channels 1-8.
Now that I figured that out I’m able to do what I need.
I have the drum pads on the MPK set to Channel 1 and the auto channel in OPXY set to 16. Seems to be working good now.
Thanks!
well fwiw if you go to project > config > midi you can route any instrument track to any MIDI out channel too, without setting it to a dedicated midi track. So they are not hard coded to channels 1-8 if im reading you correctly? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding.
If it helps anyone else, the drums tracks start at note 53 for octave “0”.
Took me a minute to figure that out.
Oh man!! You are totally right. I didn’t know that area existed. THANK YOU!
I don’t really consider using this kind of workflow on elektron boxes but the XY’s synths have somewhat encouraged me to think more about it: it seems really well suited to compose and arrange on in a nice interactive way, then when you want to record you can just switch the audio tracks that have “good enough” synth sounds to MIDI tracks and use the sequences to control better sounding synths (though you lose sound-design related punch-in fx that way I guess).
There’s also the possibility to load in wavetables to the one shot synth sampler and modulate loop position to get something a little crazier. I’d of course prefer more serious modulation and synthesis params than what’s there but it’s also clearly meant to make you go as fast as possible and the current machines do push you to just settle for a sound and start making music.
hmm… I set track 1 (aka drums) to midi channel 10 in the project config menu but to trigger the drums, the pads on the MPK had to still be set to channel 1.
I’ll play with it more and see if I can figure it out.