A bit of my background. I started writing music in Ableton Live. I think I was most productive during that period. The whole workflow made sense. What I didn’t like is using mouse and keyboard for writing. On top of that I think either my computer had issues, or I was doing something wrong, but I constantly had problems with latency, sound crackling and so on. So I dove into the world of hardware only. I started with Model Samples and that sucked me in. Now my Elektron setup is A4, AR, OT + Mother 32 and Hydrasynth. I got rid of everything else I had and that allowed me to focus on the process more clearly. I did try Push2, but didn’t like it at all.
So now is the issue I’m facing. I’m very visual person, so seeing a piano roll and clips and having instant access to this multiple levels of musical hierarchy is very important to me. Right now I use OT’s arranger to drive patterns on A4 and AR and also sequence M32 and Hydra through MIDI. I think I learned to live with the arranger, but not a huge fan of it. I really miss how I could just place a cursor at a specific place on time line and just work on it. Maybe I just need to spend more time with it. But where it goes downhill from there is completely losing visual feedback when melody is boiled down to trigs, or if I want to see relationship of different drum tracks on AR. Again, it might be that I need to spend some more time with this, but perhaps there is another way, so I started looking into various sequencers.
Disclaimer, aside from “Elektron Workflow”, I really enjoy A4 and AR as instruments.
So here is what I’ve looked at, but maybe I either missed something, or some of you may have a great workflow. Another note is that I plan to use it as a sequencer, so internal synths don’t really have any meaning. I.e. Akai MPC One internal synths are bad (from what I’ve read), but that doesn’t really bother me, as I’m not planning to use it, maybe only to just write ideas down.
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Akai MPC One. I don’t think I’ll benefit from Live MK2, as even outside the studio, I’ll always have an outlet nearby. I don’t completely like it, and the “song mode” reminds me of the arranger on OT too much. I like piano roll. Biggest problem that I have is switching patterns on Elektron gear via MIDI cc. I’ve read that it’s quite problematic, but might be wrong.
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Maschine Plus. I’ve tried to find videos of the new “Clip Arranger” on the Maschine+, but could not find anything. What I saw on the desktop sort of looks like what I want - clips that I can arrange on timeline, like in Ableton Live. Unfortunately, aside from a few reviews on YouTube, I don’t have a much knowledge of this whole ecosystem. So sometimes I feel that it’s rather ignorance that draws me towards Maschine Plus.
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Square Pyramid. I watched Loopop’s comprehensive tutorial on it, and up until Sequence mode, I really liked everything, then the Seq mode was a complete let down for me personally.
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Deluge looks like a good option. It’s surprisingly very visual for not having a screen. And I think arranger makes total sense to me, but there is something off about it. Also not sure how well will it work with Elektron boxes.
I would love to retain ability to change patterns from the sequencer as an option, but it’s not a compete no-go for me. If the sequencer is great and the workflow is great, I may pretend that all the Elektron gear I have are just instruments. Though not sure if I’ll survive without trig locks =)