I’m having a portability crisis!!! I’m fed up with machines on the living room table and cables (I just ordered an Ableton Move for this reason).
I have an SP-404MKII that I love but which is complicated in terms of workflow, and I’m considering a swap (I’m trying to keep my setup small) with this Lofi-12 XT which seems even more portable and simpler/more inspiring and immediate. Its polyphony is also a big plus compared to the DTs.
My questions:
I’ve seen very few (1 or 2) ambient music demos. Yet the Lofi-12 XT’s specs seem ideal for minimalist ambient music like the one made by Keinseier (who is on this forum and whom I love). I’m a little surprised. Any experiences or tracks to share in this area?
Can the envelopes be P-Locked and if so can the decay be as short as that of a DT for example.
Works great for ambient stuff, though infinite triggers aren’t a thing so you have to use envelopes and hold notes and stuff it’s all very doable and generative things are easy to scale lock, more available scales than digitakt, sequencer has cool random jump options, etc. envelope is ASR only but you can get very very long releases and there’s a lot of effect options. I’m hoping for ADSR in the next update.
Basically everything but the sequencer settings and master effects are lockable but you can lock per step probabilities. No bool trigs but it can do whole notes. Can do very granularish stuff with lfos. I’ve mangled samples in lots of interesting ways and at low BPM you could create extremely slow evolving melodies with locks along the way easily. I will say single cycles don’t work on it the way they do with digitakt, you need to give it a few cycles in my experience but fine tuning sample start and stop is easy and you can LFO that stuff if you want.
I made this track with the cydrums and except for the fact that I used its oscillators instead of samples everything else I did directly used features from the sequencer and effects that it and 12xt share, the first half is extremely ambient.
When I get the chance to find some ambient I made with 12xt I can share that too.
Here, I uploaded one I did with the 12XT too. This one was nothing but 12XT using some samples from the stock library I chopped into oscillators and some microfreak sounds I sampled. The live performance → mixtape file thing is so sick, that is literally the exact wav file it saved on the microSD card with zero other touchup. The different “tape” emulations it bounces too have different characteristics apparently, but it’s hard to A/B them without just recording the same pattern a bunch of different ways and that’s a dull experiment since you can just master more in a DAW later if you care.
The music itself isn’t as focused as I’d like because I was still learning how to use it and how to sequence and mix electronic stuff in general, but it was definitely calming and satisfying to make that.
