Well, funk me. I’ve spent the last year looking for the optimal solution to sort of “bring the four Elektrons” together. I’ve tried an MPC, found it too tedious to use with too little visual feedback, sold it. I waited four months for a Cirklon, found that too tedious to use with too much stuff I didn’t really need and with little visual feedback, and sold it. I eventually got the Maschine Studio - it was buggy, and MIDI implementation was crap - sold that one too. I got the Ableton Push just a few days ago, and even though it does almost everything just right, I’m experiencing weird behaviour by Live, MIDI-timing isn’t great, and it’s randomly not doing things I tell it to do (like sending program changes at the right time). I want to give it some more time, as I really like the interface and the idea behind it, but … when Push comes to shove (hah), maybe it would just be easier to simplify things?
I could just daisy chain the four of the Elektrons and keep a strict overview over which songs uses which patterns on which machines. That would somehow be a lot more immediate, yet I’m thinking it might become a bit too “restricted” and inflexible somehow (which was what lead me out on this impossible quest in the first place).
So I’m basically wondering, to you people with the quadrinity or the trinity or whatever, how do you route things? Do you just daisy chain your Elektron machines and use one of them as the main MIDI-clock center? When I got the Octatrack, I tried feeding the Monomachine and the MD through it, but never got the volumes where I wanted them to be with the listening machines. Maybe I was doing something wrong. How do you piece together your tracks? Do you have one machine sending patterns changes to the others, for instance?
Anyways - looking for some good examples to try out, as I’m getting frustrated by this process rut I’m in.
And yes, I do realize that I might just be looking for the “perfect” solution as a sort of subconscious excuse to the fact that I suck at making music. Maybe that’s the only thing I really have to realize, haha.
Edit; I just realized there was already a thread about this, that I’ve even participated in.
http://www.elektronauts.com/t/quadrinity-workflow-help/2110
So unless you have something to add, you may let this thread die a slow and painful death.