I know I’ve said this many times on many forums but it’s really hard to compare the AR and Tempest. I’ve had both and currently still have the Tempest. But I’m considering swapping it out for a Rytm again.
The AR is a great (and easy to use) sound engine with a complicated sequencer.
The Tempest is a complicated (and perhaps not great for drums) sound engine with an brilliant sequencer.
Workflow is completely dissimilar between the two. On the Tempest, creating beats is effortless, kind of MPC style. It is creating sounds that will occupy your time. The pads are glorious, big and responsive. You can capture real time performances perfectly but you gotta have some rhythm to do it. Step programming can be a bit of a faff, but it’s doable. It’s also a great synth that has tools like an arpeggiator and modulation matrix that can really be inspiring to use.
Downsides of the T is that it’s sound engine wasn’t designed for drums. DSI has compensated by adding a few hundred drum samples to make up for this and speed up the sound design process. However at it’s core it’s really not the best for analog drums. I can make better sounding analog kicks on a Microbrute.
As for the Rytm, Elektron pretty much hands you brilliant analog drum sounds on a silver platter with controls to make sensible tweaks, and even bend them into a wild aberration should you so choose. There’s a lot of possibility with standard Elektron flourishes like per-track pattern lengths and of course parameter locks.
However somehow the effects don’t sound quite as sweet as in the Analog Four. And frankly the pads suck. I found myself constantly having to go over things I recorded live and adjust velocity. The sequencer isn’t nearly as good at capturing realistic drum performances as the Tempest, which at 8 bars can have up to 32nd note resolution. Retrig is the only way around this on the Rytm, but the implementation is a pain in that it can’t be recorded in real time. So if you want some snare flams or rolls you’re gonna be manually p-locking retrigs on each step and they will have a fixed velocity.
Ultimately both are simultaneously within reach of brilliance, but also kind of a let down. Both are a bit of a laugh when it comes to MIDI, though the Tempest really takes the cake here. There is simply no way to send chromatic data to more than one voice at a time, and no per-part CC whatsoever.
The Tempest is brilliant as a 6 voice 4 oscillator synth and the sequencer is terrific and super fun to play, but it’s let down by the fact that you don’t have a lot of the tools to really create great drum sounds. (no noise, no sine wave, no sample import, no purpose built “machines”).
The Rytm is a fantastic drum synth with some really cool performance possibilities. But it’s let down by the crude sample controls (i.e. no independent eq/filter), weak FX, and it’s pads/sequencer.
TL;DR: I would say they’re NOT redundant. But perhaps not complementary in the way you’d think. Either an A4 to add synth or a MPC-1000 to add better real-time playability would probably be better. The Tempest falls short on MIDI control and synthesis; not brilliant as a tonal synth and not brilliant as a drum synth.
