What’s your favourite way to create melodies on the MD?

Hey everyone and best wishes!

I bought the MD few months ago and fell in love with it since. I use it on its own so I’m trying to learn how to make the most out of it. So my question is : what’s your favourite way to create synth for melodies on this beast? Using the EFM machines with long decay? Using a lot of LFOs on the sin machine?

For the moment my favourite way is to use the EFM machines but I guess it’s because it’s the easiest way :smile:

There’s certainly a lot to explore on the MD, even if you didn’t use it as a drum machine. :smiley:

Lots of awesome ideas for that in this thread, for example. I for one don’t have a MegaCommand, so I don’t think you absolutely need one. However, it’s likely I’ll get that at some point.

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Already read it and learned a lot with this one. The megacommand looks so good, I hope I will be able to try it someday
But I didn’t find tables to tune all the machines manually, for example the EFM CB or the EFM CY, so for now I just do it approximatively

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My favourites are:

SIN machine. Also note the Amplitude Modulation frequency works the same at the same values as the SIN machine so you can AM a second sine wave to your original to make 2-notes, add a Harmonic, or make dissonant waves by placing them close together but different.

TRX-B2, distortion to 100%, filter closed, LFO envelope to filter, resonance and everything else to taste. This is how the MD909 makes a 303 sound. Lots of versatility with filter, dirt, AM settings

Any E12 machine with retrig rate set short, filter and distortion set to taste. Great for starting with a breakbeat and then speeding it up into a blur and then into a synth sound. You can do cool wavetable like morphing by adjusting pitch and start independently while keeping the repeat rate constant.

I need to find more options here as I’m working on a all-machinedrum live set right now. To make things sound good I find it helps to mostly stick to the same synthesis option in a track - hard to make SIN and BD2 sound good with each other as the pitch mappings are completely different.

Tonight I want to try karplus-strong with the delay engine \m/

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www.gweep.net/~shifty/machinedrum/ptch/superdata.txt

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Love how you can get karplus strong kinda bass horns and plucks out of the E12 machines, using the retrig.
Changing melody pitches by p-locking retrig parameters.

I miss my MD!

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Just got a breakthrough on making in tune, 12-tone chromatic music on the MD UW - the sample slots PITCH parameter is exactly 36-steps to an octave, so 3 steps every half-tone. The first octave up and down remain in tune, after that things get a bit wonky the further you go, but that’s fine. I really enjoy the 16-tone SIN machine scale, but it mostly only sounds good with other SIN machine parts.

This’ll help me get a bit more range on my all-machinedrum set.

Oh, and my motto is Never Sell Your Machinedrum

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yeah stacking multiple SIN machines can create some great melodic content with the MD.

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Hey th0mas, thanks for all the tips in your first message !
I’m also trying to prepare a MD only liveset and I don’t have the UW so that’s why I was asking this question.

I just discovered that the EFM HH is great for dark ambient pads

And yeah I’m happy to have bought my MD before the prices gets mad, I will never make the mistake to sell it :smiling_imp:

I tried to record some acid on the MD and ended with this : ACIMD2 by Amresis | Free Listening on SoundCloud

Pretty boring pattern but it’s a start !

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How did I miss this jam, so incredible!! :bomb: I hope I’ll progress enough to make the MD sound as good as in your vid

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Thanks, there’s better audio here: Triacus | Adam Jay | DETROIT UNDERGROUND

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Hey!
So i tried to do more melodic stuff with my MD and recorded this :

I used the EFM HH for the melody and routed all the « synth » machines back in the MD to apply a filter on top of all the filter of the machines. Now I’m trying to make arpeggio with the same kit :slight_smile:

And any feedback is welcome !