I’m wondering if there are any hidden secrets to organizing patches on MM?
The majority of my time with MM is spent building sounds from scratch, but often while composing I may just want access to a set of bass patches to keep the compositional workflow going, so accessing existing patches I’ve made is helpful.
I see “patches”, really, as tracks that are held within a Kit/Pattern. And the only way to access them is to go into the saved kit, copy the track with the “patch” you want, and paste the track into the kit you’re working in.
Fortunately, you can copy kits between snapshots, so I’ve been making “Library” snapshots that are just full of various kits that all house certain sounds. For instance I may have a Virtual Analog snapshot. Kits 1-8 each have 6 patches (tracks) each with different bass sounds. Kits 9-16 with 6x lead sounds, etc.
I wonder if there is a better way to do this? A better way to circumnavigate the lack of an A4 style sound browser, and the inherent pitfalls of having sounds solely housed in kits?
Are you organizing yours similarly? Differently? How?
Was just thinking about this very issue. While I appreciate the ability to save patches, managing them consumes WAY too much of my time.
One of the biggest problems I experience is organizing kit/patch variations. Often when beginning a project, I’m doing a lot of tweaking to find what I like, what parameter tweaks are producing interesting sounds, etc. I typically save variations of these as I go and compare them to one another, however, it more often than not results in a confusing mess of patches that kills the fun because it’s such a pain to sift through.
Any ideas or systems for cleaning up this process?
Dedicating a few hours a day for a couple days doing that was very helpful for my workflow.
Another thing worth doing is taking the best bread & butter patches from the “library”, and setting them up as the last 3 or 4 kits/patterns in your current project/snapshot. That way, you have faster access to them and you don’t have to leave the snapshot to copy/paste a track.
MM is so capable, and powerful but requires some dedicated setup time if you want to get the same kind of workflow the later Elektron machines have. Really makes me want a Mk3.
The best recommendation is basically to dedicate some kits to various sounds. I would set these up at the end of my kit list, personally, say the last 10 kits or something. Then you just need to go to the kit, find the patch you want, and past it in the kit you are working on.
Personally, I’ve found it to be way more effective to just really learn the Monomachine and dial everything in as I need it. I have a love/hate thing with the inability to really create presets on the silver boxes- I love that it means you have to roll your own and really get something unique, but sometimes it’s nice to just pull up a sound when you want it.
I’ve decided to dedicate myself to getting better results out of the V/A engines, rather than seek an external synth solution.
It’s all in there, waiting to be unlocked. The key is just a very unique size.
My relationship with the sequencer, FM, arp, and BBOX (heavily p-locked) is like playing a guitar.
Just need to get to that point with the V/A side.
[quote=“Accent”] I have a love/hate thing with the inability to really create presets on the silver boxes- I love that it means you have to roll your own and really get something unique, but sometimes it’s nice to just pull up a sound when you want it.
[/quote]
That’s exactly how I feel.
I’ve decided to dedicate myself to getting better results out of the V/A engines, rather than seek an external synth solution.
It’s all in there, waiting to be unlocked. The key is just a very unique size.
My relationship with the sequencer, FM, arp, and BBOX (heavily p-locked) is like playing a guitar.
Just need to get to that point with the V/A side.
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Good luck. I think the VA machines are the weakest part of the whole machine. I get better VA sounds out of the SID machine.
I took the library approach as well. Beyond what has been said above, a few additional things that have helped me:
[ul]
[li]Create a snapshot that is otherwise empty but has all of these kits saved at the end (or wherever). Any time you begin a new snapshot, copy this snap to the new slot. [/li]
[li]Have a few kits of sounds that use multiple tracks – one synth track trigging another, or are dependent on interaction with FX machines, etc. Sometimes having the second track there is useful on its own as a reminder of how these interactions can work, and be a shortcut for setting up more complex voices. [/li]
[li]Space saver: Store variations of a particular patch using plocks. Make a patch, set the pattern to run a few bars, and every half measure or so have plocked trigs that sound different from one another. You can use any trig as the jumping off point for a new voice, and not use up as much kit space for your library. [/li]
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Love this one!
Especially good for those precious few kits/patterns with bread & butter sounds that I keep at the end of my main snapshot.
Thanks for chiming in.