Woah, ok. I assumed that sound plocks were limited to sounds from the pool that matched the currently selected sound engine…TIL! This is a huge mind-blowing revelation embarrassing oversight. Thank you!
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Ah man this changes my whole approach to the machine. I NEVER used the sound pool before since the utility seemed pretty dubious. Because the voices are all paramaterized so simply it’s very easy and immediate to synthesize a whole new sound on the fly via plocks but with the restriction that you use just one synth engine. A great burden has been lifted with this new insight you’ve afforded me. You are a saint indeed.
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No lie, I thought the same thing too and only realized you can change Synth engines with sound locks when I accidentally selected the wrong sound from the sound pool!
The sound pool is deceptively powerful. Not only does it allow you to change the synth engine, but also the velocity modulations. It has enabled me to do some interesting stuff with velocity lately.
Also if you ever want to tweak a parameter live but you have a lot of sound locks going on, be sure to use the scenes and performance macros
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I’ve been listening to Squarepusher’s new album a lot and made another IDM beat, so I think it shows.
Also experimented with some samples from Jack Antonoff’s free sample packs. I actually really like a lot of the percussion content so I recommend it to anyone who’s sniffing around for that sort of thing.
Now that I’m listening back, you can really hear how the aggressive gain-staging colors the sound like discussed earlier. For the next beats, I’m resolved to chilling the fuck out on the gain so things can sound better.
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This week I’ve been jamming to Oneohtrix Point Never’s older tracks from Rifts, yet I somehow made a trap-style hip hop beat. Halfway through the beat, I interpolate the OPN song “Betrayed in the Octagon”. I really wanted to recontextualize the strange atmosphere of that composition into something ignorant and fun.
Finally, I think I’m getting the hang of gain-staging on this machine and I think the audio quality is much crisper when you don’t drive the samples + synths too hard into the filter.
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This week I wanted to experiment with the sequencer’s ability to emulate polymeter and polyrhythmic patterns. Since you can now scale the clock on each track independently as well as set the number of trigs on a track before it repeats, learning polymeter and polyrhythm should be pretty easy, right? I tried making a beat using those concepts and realized its still definitely not easy, haha. I think there is a lot of potential in this machine for unusual rhythms. Anyone else making stuff with polymeter or polyrhythm with their Elektron machines?
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@saint_stink I enjoy what you are doing, love watching you perform them. Thanks so much for inspiration!
Do you have a general approach to the pad layout of your perfs and scenes? And do the layouts usually correspond to certain types of changes on the sounds?
I would watch an hour long tutorial on how you setup your multiple perfs and scenes for an entire song. Seems with perfs, you very often just quickly hit them on a transition etc.
Oooh or i wonder if you could design a few kits with perfs/scenes and sell them for that aspect? Whateva! It all takes time:).
Ok thanks. Sam
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Thank you so much, Sam! These are very kind and encouraging words. Also, thanks for the fantastic idea. If I’m ever slanging around kits and patches, you get them fo’ free! For some reason, I do not feel any of my kits are high-quality enough to ask money for them, but perhaps I can iron the wrinkles out and sell them with an EP on bandcamp. I’ll definitely make a tutorial like you suggested. Working on a different tutorial now (making a basic kick patch), and good god I have a lot to learn so it might take a little while. I promise I’ll write a good response regarding performance + scene layout when I have the RYTM in front of me. For now, just want to write a sincere “Thank you!”
Cheers homie!
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After a long break from making entire compositions on the RYTM, I dipped my toes back in with a fresh project. Still fun as ever, but I must admit that, lately, I’m more interested in making tracks in my DAW with the RYTM playing a supporting role. I know I promised some tutorials (and I hope to get around to them!) but making music is way more fun, sorry!
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I’m thinking of selling one (or two) of my monosynths, because my AR can do most of the same tricks. Keyboard tracking is one modulation I’d miss. I’m gonna put it (or another heart) in the “Feature Requests” thread…
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Late to the party, sorry. Anyway, this is awesome!!
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Awesome to see you’re back at it! Do you have any of the work you’ve been doing in the daw up anywhere? Your stuff is always super cleanly mixed with interesting sound design and composition so I’d be interested in checking out more of it.
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@helloliamdaly thank you so much, its great to hear that you are interested. i never really uploaded anything polished before. i have hours and hours of half-finished songs haunting me, and the only way to soothe the dread is by making more half-finished songs rather than mixing what i have, unfortunately. if you’d like i can privately send you two tracks i currently wrestling with that i would say are “approaching” completeness, of course
better late than never! thank you
the AR is a real sleeper of a monosynth and surprisingly flexible, but i think i still need a second mono with glide. even with parameter slides and careful sequencing, the AR lacks the ease and expressiveness that any standard glide functionality has. but definitely need keyboard tracking first!
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Really outstanding stuff, @saint_stink! I find your videos very inspiring and plan on getting to know my Rytm a little better this weekend after watching them.
Question for you on this video; I’d love to learn how you get your basslines to sound like they do in this video – very tight and punchy. I’m struggling to get my bass patches using the DVCO to sound similar. Any tips you could share on how you got this tone would be awesome.
Subscribed to your Youtube, and looking forward to seeing more videos like this!
@OctaveDown for sure, and thanks!
to get your basslines sounding right on the rytm, its all about sustain and release. make sure you have your AMP section setup so your “hold = AUTO” and the decay is short (but not clicking!). For this song i had decay = 4. Now that hold = auto, you need to pay attention to what your “trig length” is set to for each trig. i am in the slow process of realizing that SHORTER IS BETTER. i used to hold my bass notes to sustain until the next note, but I’m learning that it sounds way way better to only sustain halfway, quarterway, or even shorter to the next note, and follow it up with a real short note (maybe an octave or a 5th away from the initial note, or even something chromatic here and there). If you listen to some classic funk or disco basslines, you’ll hear this type of playing A LOT. for this tune, i was originally setting a lot of trig lengths for short notes to “1/16th”, but then i was like “lets just have fun and go even shorter”, so i changed them all to “1/32nd” and BOOM waaay more groove. so yeah, punchy and tight basslines are punchy and tight because they don’t occupy a lot of space on the grid. the epic long sustained whole notes have a stronger impact too when you keep most of the bassline sparse.
also, i realized its important to have the VCOs go in QUIET to the filter, it gives you headroom for dynamics and keeps it from getting too fried by the overdrive. so, for this song, i had the “level” parameter on the source page set to 64. you can compensate for the low level in the amp page and it won’t color the sound. i am also learning to be more conservative with my filter envelope; set the cutoff low, but don’t open up the filter to max with the envelope (going wide with envelope mod sounds awesome solo, but can fight in the mix). with a little resonance, that envelope setting makes a huge difference in tambre. keep the envelope mod low and you have a nice woody moog tone, go wide open it sounds like a nasty monopoly to me, hit it with a lot of resonance and now you are in 303 territory. at first i was all over the place with extreme settings, but being delicate with the filter is important, there is far more nuance than your ears will initially let on. and the envelope’s decay is incredibly important, i realize its best to go shorter with this than you instinctively want!
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Oh hells yeah. Laying down the funk.
Seriously excellent work there. You just earned yourself another subscriber.
Also, very well articulated description of your process with the bass line.
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Your stuff is so good…keep dropping those “half finished” nuggets for our enjoyment 
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Made a beat this week using samples from the Roland Sound Canvas rompler (well, vst emulation) and one of my favorite Oneohtrix Point Never tunes “Still Life”. I am falling in love with classic rompler sounds from the 90s, I think I found the pan flute patch from Super Mario 64, so I had to throw that in.
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