I’m wondering if Elektron is going to build up a complete new line of instruments around Tonverk … just like around the original OT, followed by the A4 and AR but far more sophisticated with it’s new HW platform
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Having invested time and money on a new hw platform and a different casing I think it’s a fairly safe bet to imagine a new lineup of Tonverk-shaped products.
Being Tonverk quite a new sampler paradigm for Elektron, and having them explored different synthesis approaches already on the old and current machines, it would be interesting to see if they decide to make a box with unexplored synthesis paths for them
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Well about that…
Wasn’t the DT2 supposedly built on a new and more powerfull hardware platform ?
I remember the marketing around it telling tales of a new era of more powerfull and expandable instruments. Then no further announcements, mostly bug fixes and an admittedly great slice mode.
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DTII was an upgrade of an existing machine and on the same form factor. TV is a totally different product/set of tools, and being just “a sampler” it’s hard to imagine they will not pull off at least one different product on the same platform, most probably synth based.
Every (modern) Elektron device till now has had at least a companion box based on the same architecture, I can’t see what would be the benefit of designing a new box and developing it to just let it be a “one off”.
I’ll eat a crossfader (semi quote) if we’ll not see a Synthverk in the next couple years 
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I reckon by the middle of 2026
Octatrack 2 
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Mk1 A4 and Rytm have the same OT chassis, haven’t they?
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Aaaaa, forgot about mk1s, sorry, I stand corrected! My previous message will self-destruct in five, four, three, two seconds… 
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Motion recording is still quantized to the step at least on the digis, so I think you’re letting elektron off the hook too easy. Not sure how it works with the older boxes that have parameter slides and I think octatrack has some kind of custom lfo shape tool.
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They more or less directly said this was the plan on one of the release videos, I think it was the one where EZBOT was interviewing someone from elektron.
If Waldorf drops a Drum Machine on Thanksgiving
Elektron will have to answer back with a MachineDrum3! 
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I rather agree. The things the OT does uniquely vs other Elektron gear are bpm matching and transient detection for beat slicing. These are not massively difficult things to re-implement, especially with 15 years of advancement in DSP algorithms. The live sampling (with record trigs etc) is not conceptually difficult, likewise the neat things about the MIDI sequencing/arpeggiation could be implemented on any Elektron box. I think people would be fine (even enthusiastic) with the Tonverk FX routing architecture, that’s one of the device’s strongest points.
This is a taste issue I think. I absolutely love the way the Rytm sounds, I feel the same way about that guitar players feel about specific guitar types. Unlike many others the A4 leaves me cold, it can sound great but I do not enjoy tweaking it the way I do other synths. Other people are crazy about it.
Elektron’s strengths are a bunch of very good sounding machines and effects, a deep understanding of user interface design, and The Sequencer (and also the logistics of internal cpu resource management and rock solid timing, but those are widespread now). But a lot of other manufacturers are catching up on the UI design and the sequencer stuff. So many devices have parameter locks now, many have microtiming, scale quantization, individual track lengths, and chord sequencing, and likewise probability on steps or Euclidean sequencing.
Sooner or later someone is going to implement conditional trigs in a step sequencer at that point Elektron’s sequencer advantage has evaporated. I single out conditional trigs because they’re the one thing that nobody else has done in hardware yet as far as I know, but they’re not difficult to implement. You could do a basic conditional setup to operate on each step in about 20 lines of code another 50 lines of setup code (setting up counters for how often the track has looped, flags for fill or previous etc). I hope this doesn’t seem arrogant, but stepping through an array of trigger records at human-danceable speeds and doing some modulo operations/equality checks on each step to decide whether or not to trigger is first year computer science stuff. The sequencer is the best designed part of Elektron’s ‘DNA’ but it’s not difficult technically speaking. To put things in perspective, even at if you had every sequencer channel doing drill rolls at 300 bpm, that’s about 1/400 of the calculation load for any digital synthesis/effect processing, and the math on the latter is way more complex.
I cautiously like the Tonverk (the more so following the recent update), but am not rushing at it because I have an MPC Live 1 that I can sequence with the OT or Rytm, and the MPC provides very advanced drum and chromatic multisampling engines with a very extensive effects architecture not to mention a large color screen which makes sample editing less of a chore. Thing is I got this for $400 last year and while that was a good deal it’s not hard to find similar ones. My point here is not that Tonverk sucks (it very much does not) but that there is already a lot of competition for what it does, and the competition is well designed and mature. I would like a Tonverk, but I don’t need one, and I think a lot of potential buyers are in a similar position.
Elektron got very unlucky with the Tonverk as a new product; the machine felt a bit too beta-test at launch, and then Roland and Akai came out with two very impressive flagship machines. The TR is the ultimate drum machine for many people and the Live 3 is truly a studio in a box. Realistically most people can only buy one flagship-price electronic music box at a time, and Elektron wound up in a distant third place this year. They will have to spend next year catching up, squashing open bugs, making Overbridge great for every device, and then trying to add features or audio effects that set them apart from the competition.
One thing I really do not understand about the Tonverk is the form factor. It’s nice, more spacious than the Digi boxes, with the same austere industrial design. But I really wonder why they abandoned the ‘full size’ format. I have limited space but I like full size step buttons, not pill-size ones. More importantly, I like performance controls and the Tonverk doesn’t have any, nor does it have things like parameter slides or the LFO designer or Euclidean sequencing, although that might appear in a future update. It does have some new stuff like the longer sequences, transform tools, and performance mode, but then it loses some stuff like being able to set mutes or nest sequences in Song mode, or any kind of macros. Why would you make a performance sampler with a minimalist industrial user interface, but cut the user off from performance/morphing/automation tools?
I find myself looking at things in the Tonverk manual and thinking ‘oh that’s neat…I could sequence that with the OT or the AR…’ which is kind of ridiculous when you think about it. I really like making whole tracks on an Elektron machine, but I’m extremely tired of needing to break up my sequences across multiple machines to do basic things. It’s one thing to divide machines up by function specialization, like this is a drum machine, this is a pure synthesizer, this is a sampler; that makes perfect sense. But it’s getting tedious to have audio rate LFOs on this machine but not that one, parameter slides on some but not others, pattern muting tools for song mode here but not there etc. etc. The usual comeback about this is lack of hardware resources on the different machines, but I don’t buy it. You make the decision to allocate those resources at design time, and those resources are not unobtanium. For example, the microcontroller which does all the sequencer stuff in the OT, A4, Rytm, Digitakt, Digitone is a ColdFire MCF5441x. The Digitone has 2 of them. When I say they’re not unobtanium, I mean they cost under $20 in bulk, you can get them individually for under $30. So it’s not such a question of ‘how many features can we squeeze in before we max out the chip’ as ‘what features do we want in this model, because we have a really good idea of what this chip can do and the capability to add a second one if we want more juice.’
Now with the Tonverk they’ve moved to the NXP-UCM-iMX8M-Plus which is roughly comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4 or the cpu in an iPhone 15 from a few years ago, a huge step up in computing power. This is good because it’s a platform they can develop around for at least another 10 years while still being affordable (about $50). So the omission of things like parameter slides or more LFO options is a design choice, it’s absolutely not due to any lack of computing power. And while writing for this system running a cut-down Linux is different from writing for the ColdFire microcontrollers, it’s not that different - you’re still writing C or C++ and the math underlying the sequencer remains the same. To be sure, writing a polyphonic sample playback engine and flexible mix bus are a big undertaking, but holding back modulation/macro functionality that has been on other models for >10 years just seems stingy.
I’m glad they now have a hardware platform that can last them well into the next decade, but I think they need to actually put more of this power in the hands of the users over the next 2-3 years…much more.
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20% off on Syntakt only, something’s cooking?
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I’m wondering if they will do a synth version of the tonverk.
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