RANT: I wish grooveboxes weren't all 4 bars these days

100% agree. Stopped holding my breath though. If it weren’t for trig conditions at least somewhat being able to help in this area I’d prob use my Elektron gear much less.

I hope all Elektron boxes get speed multiplier per track, so we can use one track at half speed or slower for chord progressions and melodies.

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When working with the Cirklon (or Ableton), my loops tend to end up as 16 bar. 8 bar isn’t usually enough for me.

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It would certainly help but if you stretch it too far you loose all resolution and are then restricted to on grid style placement of trigs.

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I was right there with you until this post. Bad keyboard chops and no desire to learn theory? I’m sure there are folks that fit this description, but what’s that to you? Why be mean spirited about it? The beauty of electronic music is it can be whatever you want it to be. There’s a deep history of ‘non musicians’ making music that totally changed the game for everyone. There’s also virtuosos who make crappy music. Also, no need to think companies are purposely limiting their gear just to fuck with us.

The tricky part of dealing with the whole groovebox thing is most of the time when a box is designed to ‘do everything’ it doesn’t typically do any of those things all that well. It’s like trying to stuff 10lbs of shit into a 5lb bucket.

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So glad we’re having this conversation. I was beginning to think I was the only one who had a problem with this lack of bars and the saving of chained patterns practice… It’s good to know that this handicap isn’t fully excepted…

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Once more Deluge :muscle::heart::+1:

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Conditional trigs is not the same thing as composing.

There, I said it.

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Are you serious? OT obliterates the rules :slight_smile:

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Totally depends on how you use them. The probabilities aren’t really compositional but the x:x, pre, and fill conditionals are quite useful as compositional tools.

Well, some are loudly saying that very thing :slight_smile:

I think I confused pages and patterns unfortunately.

Edit : I am still learning this thing. But it does seem pretty powerful and well featured in the sequencer department!

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Haha :slight_smile: Saying something sucks for particular tasks isn’t the same as saying it just plain sucks…

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Fair enough :slight_smile:

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Maybe with microtiming and quantise turned off that’s less of problem for melodies or chords. There’s still a lot of resolution when using micro timing on a track that runs at half speed or slower.

You lose a considerable amount of subdivisions when you scale slower though. You go from 16th notes to 8th notes. Its a easy workaround for extending the bars but its not really a good solution.

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This topic also has me curious how people compose stuff…Because personally when I write songs I tend to do it at a guitar or a keyboard, not at a groovebox. Even then, if I had eight bars in front of me, I wouldn’t want to loop it over and over again and only want to, say, adjust the sixth bar. That sounds annoying. If I get something good going and I’m liking the sound and I hear a melody I want, I’ll generally head over to an instrument and hash something out. However long it ends up being is however long it ends up being. Then I come back to the groovebox and get it into song mode or start chaining patterns.

I used to do covers on my MnM + MD that were of full songs. The song mode proved great for that and showed me how easy it is to lay out a song that way. I almost think I’d rather have a song mode and a four bar limitation than have eight bars…Eight bars is just a lot to work with.

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Flexible ‘per track’ length would be the ideal solution imo.

mnm+md song mode are vastly superior to the other elektron boxes in my opinion. not just a saved list of patterns but offsetts, bpm changes, mutes, etc. Monomachine can do program changes per step. If i remember correctly you can also live record while in the monomachine song mode, so setting things up for longer melodies is super easy.

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Not completely true, like I said in the post you replied to; with microtiming you can make up for the lost resolution.