Hi all. I owned a monomachine 8-10 years ago and got along with it pretty well with time. I have read a lot of people having trouble wrapping their heads around the A4 workflow. I was wondering, for those of you that have had both, how have they compare? The more info the better. Regards.
I wouldn’t say its any harder to work with than the Monomachine is. Probably easier in a lot of ways, although there are more features overall. Switching between Edit pages is faster due to dedicated buttons for them as opposed to having to cycle through them, and the performance page option makes tweaking specific parameters a lot easier since you won’t have to quickly cycle through different Tracks and Edit pages.
It’s really just the minor placement of things that differ on each Elektron that throws me off. With the A4, I constantly reach for the upper left-most knob to adjust Track volume since that’s where it is on everything else, so I end up tweaking some random parameter instead since the “Level” knob is to the left of the LCD screen.
Other than that, no real complaints!
Workflow-wise it’s more refined and an absolute joy to work with, if you clicked with the Mono you’ll be flying around the interface in no time.
All focus is on that single synthesis type so there’s less to learn, I imagine that users struggling to get their head around the A4 are new to Elektron products, those who’ve used the other machines, beforehand, tend to say that the A4 is the easiest to understand/use.
If you were up and running with the Monomachine, you will have no problems whatsoever.
If you liked the MM, you should love the A4.