So, this morning I woke up to find a newsletter from Elektron. Again, no news about Overbridge!
This got me thinking, and I asked myself “would i recommend Elektron to a friend/customer?”
What I see are great products, durable, but functionally incomplete and
support and customer communications aren’t great (that might be due to the country I am in) when it comes to missing functionality.
This is a genuine question. I get asked every week by friends and contacts about my Elektron box and should they buy one or another product.
So, would you recommend, for example, the Digitakt, to a friend, music contact or customer?
I would (and do) highly recommend Elektron products to friends. If I worked at a music shop, I would be very forthright that Overbridge ain’t really a thing yet for Digitakt and never will be for the Octatrack. I knew this before I bought my DT and OT and while it would be nice, it hasn’t stopped me from making music. In fact, they’ve increased my musical output by a lot. I would also bookmark some of the (many) amazing songs/jams/techniques, etc., that people are pulling off with these instruments.
Personally, I don’t see anything as ‘missing’ in either of my Elektron boxes. Sure, OB will be a nice add on, but it hasn’t stopped me from making music and having fun. I also don’t think song mode on the DT is a ‘missing’ feature. It was never offered and I’d never use it if it was. It’s much more creative and fun to think of it as an instrument and work accordingly. For me, not everyone, obviously.
I don’t know…people bitch a lot about ‘missing’ features on every kind of gear, but how can something go missing if it was never there? Just a thought
I think of Elektron machines as my kids Pokémon, gotta collect them all! Some get away from time to time, but I’ll catch those again. They’re all worth having!
I have recommended them, just being super clear about what is and isn’t functional at the moment. My experience with the Digitakt has been too good not to. (I’ve had one friend buy a DT after playing with mine; another is saving for one; another opted for an OT.)
I remember sitting on the DT for some time, thinking that no OB and song mode might cramp the device’s abilities to help me make music. But after a lot of YT videos, I pulled the trigger on one, and I’ve never looked back. When you look past OB and the lack of song mode, you start seeing the DT as a real music instrument, which many music instruments don’t have a recording feature. The sound board inside sounds REAL GOOD, and loading/capturing samples is really easy. I didn’t find the DT hard to figure out, just took time digging through all of its features and possibilities. When you practice and get quick with the DT, it becomes a beast of a jam box.
Short answer: hell yes, but they need to put in some time learning.
Thanks @Snipecatcher, this is great input. Myself i’m only missing the soundcard feature. (Which, when i bought the DT was a selling point on the website, box and various other marketing mediums) Same for the individual outs, for me this feature is a “nice to have”. But others are desperate for this, though.
I’m involved in a small group on a chinese social medium platform, mostly local people, some further afield. I’m often asked about the features and functionality from old users and potential buyers. It’s quite difficult to explain (my chinese level is only quite basic) to them that not all the features listed on the box are there because of waiting for another piece of tech to be released.
Elektron products. existed and were highly regarded and recommended before Overbridge was even known about. When I bought my A4 it didn’t exist…it came later as a free bonus and MK1 has worked just fine for me.
It’s ironic that the ‘possibility’ of Overbridge in the future would diminish a recommendation…they are ultimately ‘hardware sequencers’ to get you away from a computer, overbridge adds a second option of easy DAW integration, but they already integrate with audio and midi!
If someone mainly wanted to use El;ektron from a computer I would probably not recommend diving in just yet on the Digitakt, Digitone or MK2s, but I bought a Heat MK2 and Digitone being fully aware there was no OB and that it was very late…sure, I am a bit miffed they wont make the beta public, but other than that they area great ‘stand alone’ sequencers and fx boxes that will only get better (for me) when the FREE (remember when itg was going to haver to be purchased!) overbridge software is relased….by which time I probably still won t have mastered what the box can do stand alone.
PS- The OT has never had and probably never will have OB, but I would still recommend it!! Funny how you don’t miss something that doesn’t exits!
I would recommend it 100% with the following precautions to save them from some frustration:
Always buy a product for what it can do now. Don’t expect they will add features, like a song mode and don’t expect that promised features will be delivered on time. e.g. if they need something like Overbridge, I would tell them to wait until it’s actually released before buying.
Always skim the manual before buying a product to really know what it can do and what it can’t. There’s always questions where people is frustrated because they try to do things the product can’t actually do.
Always scan the forums before reading a product, for example somebody may expect that the Digitakt forwards pitch bend and mod but it doesn’t. The only way to know something like that is checking the forums. Also it helps you to know the current bugs and decide if you need to wait before they fix them to buy the product.
That being said, I find the small Elektron boxes really intuitive and practical, you can make full albums with just one of them. Great sequencer, the menu diving is pleasant and you can squeeze them to do a lot of things that maybe the designers of the product never imagined you could do.
Recommended videos for a friend so they can decide better:
great answer Jano, but the 50 or so people I am trying to help are Chinese natives and don’t speak/read English very well (or not at all). Also, many don’t get access to youtube or even Elektrons website. It’s difficult for them so they turn to me and ask, why can’t it do this, how do i do that, when will this happen?
I can’t even copy something from Elektron to translate into Chinese so they get off my back. Btw, i’m not a supplier, I am only a user, maybe I was one of the first to buy a DT here in China (June 2017). i just wish i could give something official to help them understand.
It’s my understanding that there’s no way to add OB to the Octatrack because the processor is pretty much maxed out in its current iteration.
Knowing what I now know about the Octatrack, I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to lots of people. On forums, people can get super worked up about what certain pieces of gear cant do. But what the OT CAN do is so interesting and utterly unique, there’s really nothing out there quite like it
It’s a straight up hardware thing. The usb on the OT simply exist as a means to access the CF card and is not integrated into the system in a manner that would allow OB to happen. Also the reason why no usb midi on the OT.
Working in musical retail myself, I rarely ever recommend Elektron gear. There’s maybe a few customers who actually look for machines like these in my demographic. Even those in that demographic prefer seamless workflows with their computers, so I can’t in all good conscience recommend Elektron unless they don’t mind multitracking one by one (for DT and DN at least.) I’ve only had one customer who actually came in for Elektron gear, and we scored him a minty OT MK1, but that was about it. My area is mostly young rappers/producers and classic rock dad bands so that has a lot to do with it as well.
I do have to say though almost every pro audio vendor that comes in either owns and or has used Elektron stuff and love it. I had the DT and let it go which I still regret.
