I spent half of this year fretting over which of the many hardware samplers from Elektron will fit my needs best - Digitakt, Octatrack Mk2, Analog RYTM Mk2, Octatrack Mk1 used - studying their feature sets and possibilities, while also fretting over the knowledge that I can’t spend any money on gear right now. I looked to software solutions, but none (including sw/hw hybrids like Push and Maschine) really satisfied (although, for the record, Renoise Redux looks very cool). Then I came across a video (the Elektron “Workflow” video for Machinedrum) that showed me that a piece of gear I already owned, the Machinedrum UW+ MkII, already does everything I want in a hardware sampler - it live samples in real-time, has a tweakable p-locking sequencer, and has lots of audio mangling possibilities. It also one-ups the Digitakt by having a song mode. Literally everything I was lusting after was sitting on my desk the whole time. I had just never dug into the sampling capabilities, taking it to be a drum machine with unwieldy tacked-on sampling as an afterthought. But that’s not the case at all - the workflow is really easy!
Just goes to show, look more closely at what you have, and learn your current gear before deciding that you really need XYZ.
