Totally new to the Elektron world. I recently purchased a RYTM MK2 and I am loving it. I’ve learnt so much already and still I feel I am just scratching the surface.
Anyway, I wanted to get some ideas of how you guys are recording into Ableton from your RYTM?
I would love to know how you find the best way to be hands on with the RTYM and bring that feeling into your DAW to produce a track. I will run through the methods I have tested.
First of, jamming on the RYTM to get a groove and pretty much the main idea of how my track will go. This is great, loads of fun and exactly what I was after.
Then onto getting these sounds into my DAW.
I have tried just soloing sounds and recording in a few bars of each into a channel in Ableton to preserve any FX / Overdrive / LFOs I have. I repeat this with all my sounds and then have Audio recorded that I can start stretching out into a track. This is cool, but it takes away from the fun of jamming and puts me back into the computer copying and pasting.
Second thing I tried was splitting all the channels up individually via Overbridge and recording in like this. This is more fun but I obviously lose my FX. I know about recording the FX on a seperate channel but this can get very messy when you go back to editing and arranging your track in Ableton.
Third thing I did was same as above but put my own Ableton FX on the individual channels. And didn’t worry about RYTMS. This took the hands on approach away from the RYTM again.
I want to preserve the fun of the RYTM within my production, jam into Ableton and tweak parameters on the fly. This seems a lot harder to achieve than one would expect.
Hope that all make sense. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Just ideas of how you guys approach this and your workflow.
And on a side note… I was thinking of pairing the RYTM with a CYCLES. Any thoughts on this? Or a Digitakt, what pairs the best?
I have created Drum Racks as presets in Ableton to play the AR via Midi from the DAW and an External instrument to connect to all audio channels from Overbridge.
There are a couple of options and setups possible to play the AR live OTB and record the audio ITB, or to controll and record everything from ITB.
There is a reason that you lost your FX. It’s depicted in the manual, where the sound architecture is shown. The FX is not sent to the individual outputs. The FX are send/return lines from/to the mixer bus, and are on the main out only. AFAIK the main out is transmitted via Overbridge too.
Thanks for the reply. And yes, I know about the architecture. It wasn’t my concern really. As I mentioned, if we can’t jam into Live with the FX then is the work around having those FX within live so you can jam and not bother about RYTMS FX.
Or is it a record each channel in individually to maintain the internal FX of RYTM. Just wondered what each of you do.
The Drum Rack / Midi implementation sounds interesting. I’ll look into it. Thanks again
Just to answer this: All inputs of Overbridge go to separate tracks and are mixed there old-school like having mics from a real drum set, using channel strips or equivalent plug-ins.
Not sure if this was already cleared up for you, but if you mute all channels on the main out in the audio routing then the main out are fx only and if you then record individual tracks plus main outs in overbridge you will get all individual tracks plus a separate fx track from the main out. That works for me.
I like to play with the mutes and fx on the Rytm, so sometimes I just record the stereo output from Rytm into Live. Add some synth tracks in Live, sounds good enough. If I want to have all the tracks separately, I have used Overbridge. Haven’t used the solution of recording each track with fx yet.
Due to the hardware restrictions there isn’t a workflow that fits “best”. Either you loose the fx or you have a hard time in post processing.
IMHO the best workflow (when you want to be productive and not just having fun) is to separate the production stages as much as possible. Don’t go back and forth (endlessly) between jamming with the hardware and arranging/mixing/mastering in the DAW. That’s just a waste of time and will never flow nicely, because these are completely different “jobs” requiring completely different mindsets.
Jam a while, multitrack record everything what’s possible and then change “hats”.
Maybe the best work around would be to record your seperate tracks through overbridge into your DAW, temporarily sacrificing the FX.
Do your processing / arrangement in your DAW on the individual channels
And then when the bus is ready, send the signal back through the Rytm to gain the Distortion / Compressor. (for delay & reverb you could use the Mute technique outlined above)
not possible, fx are sends and master distortion/comp are part of main outs, no way to record individual channels through these without recording individually from main out
well, to be frank, there’s no way to do that in any hardware or software setup, imagine a daw with 8-12 tracks, two sends for reverb/delay and compressor/distortion on the main track, you can’t tap to the individual tracks and record with the sends or the main buss, you’d have to mute everything and record through the main buss individually, only if you have insert fx you can record from individual tracks but that’s not how the signal flow goes…
Mmmm, not quite. a fast USB bus can handle 32 tracks of audio. So witin the sotware architecture routing Rev and Delay OPs to separate tracks should be straight forward. If I patch jacks into the individual outs it does not remove those tracks from the main LR in Overbridge. It only removes them from the hardware outs of the the AR, deselect from the OB LR is done in software. Rev and Delay on separate OB tracks is the bit that would make things easier for me. Distortion and Compression I can add over te whole mix or on subs easily enough, I have plenty dist and comp boxes in hardware and software. Insert FX are always going to printed with the audio right enough but with send FX it should be easy enough to bus the returns seaparately in software.
if you want to remove them from main outs you can do that from the audio routing menu, they will still be sent to fx but not to mains
how so? even if you have them on separate OB track it is still one track, so whatever goes in gets recorded, you’d still need to solo individual tracks going into fx to capture wet track…
if I setup resampling track in Ableton, I’d still have to solo stuff including sends to capture individual tracks + sends, doesn’t really matter they are separate tracks, if I have 4 audio tracks being sent into the same reverb I can’t capture them individually with the reverb unless I solo each one…
Hey Alec, I should add a bit of context I guess.
I can live with all Reverb sends coming back on one return to one track, that’s ok. The Delay FX however are used to make riffs, so having rev and delay separate really helps.
The rub is that the current song I am working on has 33 patterns, likely to go up to 40 ish once I add breaks etc between the main riffs. And as it is kit per pattern this means that, to record the Delay separately I have to go through 40 kits and turn the Rev send off.
Within the soft patch it would be super handy to be able to route, send FX returns separately. I am pro sound engineer, I do a lot of Live gigs on digital consoles. This kind of thing is really easy to do on Digital consoles.
ah, I got it, I don’t think any elektron box offers separate tracks for the fx… still wouldn’t consider it a limitation though, I mean it’s not a console/mixer, and honestly not sure hardware wise if that would be possible, I mean considering they couldn’t give us second lfo and I assume tapping audio separately from each and sending it over OB requires some processor juice, which seems to be impossible…
No I don’t think my DT offers separate send FX out in OB either. The limitation lies in creative realm…I can take any of my devices like the AR or the DT anywhere, if I go away or even if I am just going to bed. And on those occasions when I’m noodling about, one comes up with stuff. The Delay’s in this song rely heavily on Parameter Locks. So a means of getting that Delay track into Ableton would be Fab!
A 2nd LFO not arriving because there is not enough PP makes sense as the parameter modulated by it would need a lot of calculation. But a simple split in routing inside software I don’t think would take much PP.
You need to set up your Audio Routing page so that only the FX channels are being played through the Master output, so when you record from OB you have 8 channels of sample tracks + a stereo FX track for both reverb and delay.
" 15.5.1 ROUTE TO MAIN
Use this option to customize which of the 8 tracks + 2 effects (Delay, Reverb) that sends audio through
the master effect (Compressor) to the MAIN OUT outputs. Use the [TRIG 1–8] keys and the [FLTR], and
[AMP] keys to activate/deactivate send from each track and effect. Green keys signal send to main. Red
keys signal do not send to main. Note that each track still sends to its TRACK OUTPUTS."
