Has anyone information how to simulate the groove or swing behaviour of classic machines like the 808/909/MPC with the AR swing triggs or microtiming?
I know if I would like to introduce timing jitter I could use a small silence at the beginning of the samples and the LFO for pseudo randomize the sample start, but that’s splitting hairs perhaps.
cheers
Sample start manipulation with an LFO works, but the coarse range of 0-127 is the problem. I tried messing with this back in the day and the results were clunky at best. I believe a digitakt might be better at this sort of thing,
The only way to get a jittery clock to the unit is to use it as a clock slave and send MIDI clock from a device that has this sort of timing.
Yes, use your elektron box as the master clock source. press play.
The sweetest timecode known to mankind will be immediately sent to connected machines.
no faff needed.
The AR averages incoming clock and uses it to set the tempo on its own sequencer, so this won’t work as you expect.
Oh, didnt know this. So no way then, other than to bypass the int seq completely and send MIDI notes…
fwiw I am a big fan or microtiming and unquantized playing and consider timing jitter fetism ”not for me”
In most cases it’s also not about the timing jitter, but rather envelope retriggering resulting in differences in sound level and quality.
Create a pattern on an 808 with two kicks immediately next to each other and you know what I’m talking about… 
But of course, the envelopes of old do not retrigger, and oscs drift etc. But at least I thought people who obsess about the timing are really talking about the timings, and not the ”organic” nature of the sounds? I mean, an MPC will not give you a similar organic sound, no matter how you time the hits…
The machinedrum kicks behave differently when retriggered quickly too.
These differences are perceived as “groove” and therefore people assume it’s all about timing even though this is often not the case. It can be very hard to hear if a certain groove comes from variation in timing, or from accents in terms of loudness or timbre.
I could be wrong, but I think 90% of what people love about the 808 or 909 is how the sound interacts, how you can add accented steps, and how changing levels often not only changes loudness, but introduces subtle timbre changes as well.
None of this is random. It’s partly intentionally designed that way, or it was a happy side-effect of the designers trying to create nice-sounding circuitry with as little parts as possible (this is probably true for how the kick triggering behaves on the 808 ;)).
Yes, when you use the TRX machines, which are modelled after the TR-808 and TR-909. 
Exactly! Notice that he says about programming natural sounding high-hat patterns in the same interview:
When a real drummer plays a great-sounding groove containing 16th-note hi-hats, he varies the loudness of each hi-hat hit in a way that he has developed over years of practice. If he were to play each note at exactly the same volume, he’d sound like a bad drum machine beat. […]
There is a ton of jitter on an 808. I used to slave Logic to an 808 and the jitter was as much as +/- 0.7% in a measure. It was magical.
i think jitter is a reality and it does in some certain circumstances create an impression. slop can be good but not for every music. if you need perfect timing for your 1/64 rolls then you may have a case but for other music, jitter would just come off sounding more natural. i imagine that a real drummer moves before and after the beat dynamically according to the passage of music they are playing at the time, something that im not sure electronics can emulate without human input. of course, other factors can make an electronic beat feel pulled or pushed including advancing or retarding the timing of the individual steps, the amp envelope of the element in question, how the element is interacting with other elements, but its mostly the syncopated pattern and skill with which that is presented to the listener by the musician that counts in my honest opinion.
if you aint fonkay then you aint gona git a machine to be fonkay for ya, that aint werkin bruh. you doin it wrong. aint no half steppin!
Oh yeah, the 808 can be a bit loose, just like the MIDI Clock Messages output on most Elektron boxes.
That’s exactly what I always thought swing was exclusively
fwiw I think the level of technical ignorance among random MPC users further muddy the waters. I might be mistaken, but often when I read stuff on MPC forums / threads, I get the feeling that the MPC, being a quite simple beatbox to learn to use, maybe resonates more with less technically inclined, less ”nerdy” folks who are not that interested to learn about these things.
This is not directed towards anyone in particular!
indeed. the kind of user that simply records a passage from a record and chops it into 1/8th note slices and re triggers it out of order / context, and feels its a worthwhile pursuit
but hey it made Sinéad O’Connor famous in the 90s haha
Sinead O Connor sampled? Never knew that… crickey!
yeah back when everybody was sampling james brown. sorry, maybe thats a bit way back for some
I used to chuckle when people would say the MPC sound is so tight. Of course it’s “tight” the older MPCs were low resolution at only 96 PPQN. That’s a limitation, not a feature to me. LOL.