I’m giving it another go now, though. It’s working out better this time around.
But I think it’s worth saying, whatever melodic and harmonic abilities the Syntakt have and however clever any future creatives will be on how to work within those limitations, with the current feature set, this isn’t a chords and leads instrument. Just because you can bend its circuits in a certain direction, doesn’t mean it’s a challenge worth taking.
The Tempest has been around for over a decade and people have been very creative with it down the line, in terms of doing non-percussion stuff, polyphonic compositions and whatever. But the results are always “You can do that on a Tempest?”, less “Wow that’s just plain good, period.”
So for me, it comes down not to trying to push a machine because I can, but to find out if it works with my own perception of my musical voice.
But slow or abstract ambient can definitely benefit from creative percussion and drum patterns, and the FX block to boost with that adds a tremendous lot of movement to a genre that’s very much about being almost its own organism, when a track works.
