So, I know I’m not the only one who does this. Constantly rotating things in and out of your setup, minimizing, growing, capping, optimizing, paring down, etc… so I have arrived at this:
Digitakt and TR-8S!
The TR-8S is new to me and I frickin love it so far. I’ve not gotten the DT to sequence the TR yet because I’m still exploring the TR. It’s a way deeper machine than I anticipated!
I came to the conclusion that my sound design, melodies and such are 90% done in the DAW so exporting multiple melodic loops and bass line variations is no problem. I lose nothing because my music is not terribly complex and gain the magic of sequencing via hardware + all the hardware tricks and sound mangling.
Yes the TR-8S is pretty big but together with the DT it is a very manageable setup. I’m even going to experiment further with the extra outputs to hopefully feed copies of individual channels or a copy of the summed stereo out back into the DT input for sampling and mangling. Maybe TR can’t do that but I won’t let it stop me from doing something totally different instead if so 