Indeed, limitations force you to focus on other things in the process, so that spurs creativity. I will try to keep it simple by not changing the workflow all that much and instead embrace the tools that I already know how to use.
Above all, I will focus on having fun rather than worrying about the workflow not being “perfect”.
Yeah, I think I’m probably at 80% procrastination/GAS and 20% making music today, so I’m definitely going to improve the ratio. 
That’s an interesting feature that I wasn’t aware of. I do GAS for an MPC One on some level (and that Ableton element doesn’t help!) but I’m most productive with my iOS workflow, using Ableton for the final mix process, so I’ve managed to hold off for the moment. I’m hearing intriguing rumblings about the next round of Akai updates which may test my resolve further though…
Im not having Fins greasy KFC fingers coming into my house thankyou very much 
You have to commit at some point. If you spend too much time on something, you’ll lose the spark that started it.
The trick is to do a few takes of the audio recording. Route it to an audio track and do the recording live (instead of bouncing offline).
Record things separately if you can.
The first take should be a few loops of it just how it is. No tweaking or messing with it.
For the following takes do some live tweaking/playing of things. Don’t worry too much about it sounding perfect. Maybe twiddle a few knobs or play a few added notes/beats.
This way you have some variations of the same thing. You can grab pieces and comp parts afterwards. You won’t feel the need to go back unless it’s for a very specific purpose.
Otherwise you’ll never finish anything. Just endlessly tweaking loops that you’ll be sick of in a week or two.
That’s exactly my strategy nowadays and it definitely works for me to commit early on to the sounds and samples I’m using, my only stumbling block now is mixing and FX automations which I find equally hard to not obsess about 
I’ve got nothing for you on that one 
Well maybe a little.
Don’t do mixing automations until the whole thing sounds good with a “static” mix. They’ll mostly make spots that are too much effort to change and you’ll want to give up on it.
Adjust EQ in the mix makes sense but don’t forget to solo the sounds and make sure they still sound great on their own.
If you find the need to hide something in the mix then there is something wrong with that part. You should be able to turn up any sound/part and still like it (even if it’s unbalanced).
If mixing isn’t solving it, try changing the arrangement.
If arranging can’t solve it consider removing or replacing the part entirely.
Keep taking away as much as you can without losing the original idea/feeling.
Worse case, shelve it, work on something else and come back to it in a couple of weeks, determined to finish it.
Edit: one more:
Put saturation/drive (wet/dry mix to taste) and limiters on every individual drum sound or anything that needs to be forward in the mix.
Saturation pushed into a limiter brings up all of those nice details on each sound that normally get buried in the mix.
This is good advice! I tend to use parallell processing on drums to achieve similar things, haven’t tried your approach but will do and compare.
This is true, and this is the workflow I embrace when the music is in the sketch/arrangement phase so I don’t get stuck in a loop or section of the song too long. However, when things start to sound good and more like a complete song, that’s when I tend to get new ideas that involve going back to the sequencer and changing some notes. I think I’ll have to practice on knowing when something is right and when I need more time to tweak the melodies so I don’t end up committing to print too soon.
Anyway, great advice, thank you.
That’s where recording a few takes with live tweaking and playing comes in.
You can listen through those takes and potentially find what you need without going back.
Nice tips thanks, I tend tend to use Abletons glue compression with drums once they’re all leveled properly, but I’m definitely going to try your suggestions next time I get a chance…
Yeah, try saturating/distorting or even using the Ableton Amp plugin (the goal being add harmonics and beef up the sound) .
Just mix a little wet (20% or less as a gauge if you need) in before pushing the individual drum sound into the limiter. The limiter clips the tops a bit, allowing more of the quiet parts to be heard. The more transparent the limiter the better. Compressing changes/shapes the sound too much (and let’s the peaks through), hence the limiter.
Subtle is always what you’re shooting for.
Then still do your usual bus compression/glue after that.
Try it on other sounds besides drums too.
Trying to not use DAWs, and then wanting all the fears from a DAW, is always a fun search.
Back when fixed-gear freestyle started, folks used big track-style bikes to do tricks, instead of BMXs, which were of course designed for doing tricks.
Which is not to say either is better. Just that it might be best to assess your requirements, then pick a tool based on that, rather than striking the best option off the list and wasting weeks and months and thousands of euros on forcing the wrong tool to do the job.
Then the bike makers started to make dedicated fixed-gear freestyle bikes, and they got straight forks, smaller and smaller frame triangles, and so on, until they started to look suspiciously like BMXs.
To do this, here is my advice :
I know this might sound counter-intuitive, but actually one of the reason of GAS, is trying to fix your your current gear flaws and the inability to optimally use all of the features that you once hoped were working (and are not). Fighting this desillusion gives you one other desillusion : More gear might help. It is completly false
I have some personnal stories to illustrate this :
. I had (and still have) issues with syncing the tempo to reaper, I even went back to ableton live (that I left for years) for this particular issue. However, I was so incomfortable with ableton live (yes I know), that I finally got back to reaper. Since that time, I changed my point of view on this : I am the issue. Of course, overbridge sync is not working, and maschine is not easy to integrate, but if we think about it, I have more possibilities now than with reaper alone, Yet I made the best piece of music with reaper. So I decided not to gas and keep my flawed setup… and it worked !I just had to change my way of making music and stop struggling against the issues of my gear/setup. It actually gave me some creative limits : I use either the digitakt alone with a small multi-timbral hardware synth, or reaper using a very simple project template consisting of 8 tracks I control from my midi keyboard, sometimes using overbridge on one of these track and using resampling in reaper to stay away from the sync issues.
I am happy because, I have never been so productive since I did that.
hoping it might inspire you and other people reading
I love this kind of thinking and it boils down to the same advice others have already given in this thread: simplify things and leverage what you’ve got.
There’s another important thing that has become more clear to me as I’ve made the micro journey over the course of this very helpful and therapeutic thread: making music is about having fun! And the fun start the second you stop worrying about workflow improvements/problems and instead start making music. It’s not the tool that determines whether I’ll end up writing a banger or not, it’s me and where I choose to devote my time - for example, to waste hours on GAS, or, you know, to actually make music.
This goes back to the whole reason for choosing this hobby in the first place. To me, it’s the enjoyment I get from creating. GAS clearly isn’t always fun - sometimes it is, and I love dreaming about things in general, but I know in my stomach when it’s not fun anymore.
This translates to a few things I hope to change about how I approach this hobby:
I’ll actually distill some of the best advice from this thread and print it out as a reminder to myself when I’m getting stuck in some GAS/workflow loop again in the future. Thanks again everyone!
This is still a work in progress as I don’t know yet what my “final way” will be.
The main principle I have is that I “perform” the tracks live from the Elektrons. The DAW is there to record it and to make it a proper track. (A bit like how you would approach a traditional band with a singer, guitarist, bass, drums etc.)
So first I recorded all tracks of the Digi’s separately with the Overbridge VST’s in Ableton Live while jamming live on the Elektrons. I recorded several “comps” as they call it (different takes per track) and then did a lot of post editing, eq etc.
This works, although I have some sync issues sometimes with the DN and DT, and I also found it a bit cumbersome as I basically had to do the mixing from scratch again.
Next to that, all OB tracks are mono and all stereo information (including LFO) is discarded in these separate tracks.
And it’s more work than just using a DAW without any hardware, which was the most imported thing that attracted me by using hardware devices: to use less DAW.
Then the Digi’s acquired the base/width filters and the DT also the EQ’s, so then I mostly could do all the sound shaping and mixing in the Digi’s themselves and record and “comp” the stereomixes.
Ha, finally some advantage here of using hardware boxes as this works pretty fast 
And this works well, but the finetuning afterwards is limited to copying & pasting different sections from all the takes. Which can be enough, I’m not sure yet.
So now I’m trying out a sort of “Song mode” implemented in Ableton so I also record the performance as MIDI data so I can post edit mutes / sweeps / cc data and finetune that.
It’s far from perfect as:
Still I like to do this because I now can work on the structure and build up of the tracks and can change anything I would like afterwards.
I can also do this for specific pattterns just to finetune some sweeps / cc changes and rerecord these back in the digi’s in separate patterns for variations.
Maybe I’ll just use this so I can anchor the tracks and use that for rehearsals. Besides that, I can’t always remember how I “performed” a specific track so with the MIDI data and the stereo mix I can recreate / check this more easily.
So as you can read, I’m not there yet
Yeah I learned that the other week too. It’s a bummer actually, I would have loved to have the possibility to record all live performance actions from these boxes into the MPC (or Ableton in your case). I guess it’s clear that Elektron has designed their machines to be live oriented. Think of it as the electronic music equivalent of the electric guitar.
Well, that’s the thing I realized in this thread: there’s no such thing as the perfect workflow. They all have their flaws, so it’s best to embrace that and continue to refine, rather than to think that throwing everything out the window and starting something new will be better.
I think you just gave us the best summary on how you should approach it 
@djst, all the time spent on this thread you could’ve made a couple of tunes on Ableton by now. 
Seriously though, over the last 6 months I’ve seen you get the MPC, the MC101 and a few other things that I know and have picked up on and used slightly before you. Digitone springs to mind too.
It’s been interesting to read your long form and detailed descriptions/reviews, as it’s often been similar to what I think but I would never have the patience/inclination to write as thoroughly as you do.
With that, and with my own experience, I feel Ableton would suit you, and would be worth the time investment.
If my studio gets wiped out tonight, tomorrow morning I re-buy Ableton first, then an MPC down the line a little.
Those are the two environments I go to to make music these days. End of.
Everything else feeds in.
A good friend of mine, who is highly prolific musically, came to visit me last year when I had my first proper performance dawless setup… an Analog Rytm, A4, Novation Peak and a Keystep Pro.
I was having a lot of fun jamming through a 2kW rig in a warehouse, and learning, so it was all valid.
But my friend looked at what I was doing and said to me… ‘just get Ableton and thank me later’. (I paraphrase slightly, but that was the gist).
I resisted him at the time, thinking ‘I like what I’m doing here, I’m onto something and he doesn’t understand…’.
But, 16 months later, he was exactly right and, with hindsight, I should have embraced it sooner than I did.
I knew 3-4 weeks into 3 month demo period that I was going to buy it.
And, I really like how the MPC and Ableton work with and complement each other.
My 2c. 