Your biggest gripes,problems and disappointments with the MnM?

Elektron Gear Monomachine
#1

Hey !

I’m probably about to get a :elmm: mkII ( no +drive though ) on a trade with my mpc live next week.
Getting an :elot: Mk2 has been a sentence to death for the mpc !
Since there are a lot of mpc for sell at the moment, I find that getting the :elmm: plus a nice amount of cash will probabbly better than waiting for someone to buy my mint ssdified mpc for less and less cash as time passes.

So, tomorrow, is the day :3lektron: will announce something or not, and if something called DigiTone :tm: drops and is somewhat a successor to the old :elmm:, I’ll have to choose what to do.

That’s why I need your help, I know what the :elmm: is good at and for and what type of sounds I will get from it, what I would like to know is what makes you mad about it, what does not works, what is limiting, what I will discover after monthes working on it ? Bugs, essential or stupid missing features ?

To give more background, I currently own an :elan:, an :elot:, a :heat: and I had a :elmd: for a while, so I’m pretty confident with :3lektron: ways of making things work.

Thanks a lot !

#2

Mmm, I’d say the filter resonance is not really great. Envelopes are rather simple, but sufficient. It’s not in these department that MM really shines.

:elmm: is really good at glitches (BBOX), FM (hard to really understand what is going on, so you have to experiment a lot and go forensics on LEM patches), modulating anything with 3 LFOs, 1 full delay per track, immediate switching from 6 Mono to 1 Poly, Wavetables…

@Veets even explain how to make super chords out of the latest. Check all his MM related videos.

MM special trick might be the crazy arpeggiator : watch Yevgeny Kushnir’s video for an incredible example

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#3

Synth pre dated conditional trig’s. Sound is an acquired taste, like Vegemite. Sound is also very unique making it worthwhile to have in any setup.

#4

My sound design and programming skills were too poor for this awesome instrument.
It requires time and dedication. Instant gratification is not its strong point.

7 Likes
#5

i would also consider the fact that a new machine might not be as ‘stable’ as the MM is, unless of course, that is something you would not worry about.
as mentioned already, there’re few thing missing on the MM but other than that, it’s still a great machine…(if only it had trig conditions aaand maybe sampling :scream_cat::laughing:)

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#6

The faceplate will slit your wrists thus making you an emo.

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#7

41 years old emo should be epic !

Thanks guys, let’s see what comes out tomorow !

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#8

The monomachine mk1 is pretty limited because of the lack of +drive, saving projects is limited and the ability to upload user waveforms is missing. Something’s I would consider gripes of the particular model you are interested in getting.

Other criticisms I’ve heard is too digital sounding, difficult to program sounds, over aggressive filters. Personally none of those are gripesto me. I love my monomachine and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

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#9

Probably my biggest gripe is that it is the least performance-friendly bit of Elektron gear. The original model with the keyboard had a joystick that looked easy to integrate into ones setups (configuration pages for it are still there), but the standard table-top model is missing that. I wish they had found a way to put a tiny joystick in the MK2 versions.

Analog 4 has the performance macros (and whatever the new ‘quick perf’ thing is in the Mk2). Octatrack has scenes and the cross-fader. Machinedrum even has the ‘function + knob = super-macro’ feature which, combined with the ‘quick reload’ feature, makes doing some rapid massive sound changes easy (I hear the Digitakt has similar feature). This is the one thing I miss having on the Monomachine more than anything else. (Edit to add: I do have the Goliath / SMD box primarily to do some performance macros on Monomachine, but I still wish there was a built-in feature to target multiple parameters at once. I may have to look into getting that E-Touche thing at some point),

On the other hand, those 3 LFOs with the ability to change any of the 8 parameters - including destination - on a single step? Powerful powerful thing. I’ve recently embraced sticking to 16 step patterns to make it less likely I’ll run out of parameter lock memory, because P-locks are so powerful on this machine. (Easier to use up a lot of 16 step patterns, though, when you’ve got a +Drive to fall back on). And loading up custom DigiPRO wavebanks has really opened up the machine even further.

3 Likes
#10

The things that made me let go of the monomachine, twice!, were things that made me love other Elektrons.

It was the lack of, and in order of most important:
Polyrhythms
Microtiming
A4/AR style sound browser/management,
Macros
Conditional Trigs

I loved the filters, neighbor routing, delay and EQ per track, all those LFOs. But with other more capable Elektron sequencers sitting around it, it went unused too much to hold onto. At the end of the day, my music relies wholly on how much I can milk out of a single sequencer.

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#11

I kindof like that Monomachine does NOT have this. I struggle with this part of the A4 for some reason… Like I don’t understand which one I should save and when; versus just saving the whole Kit on the Monomachine.

Plus Monomachine has ‘Copy Machine’ in its wonderful ‘super-copy’ menu which I wish to high heaven was on Octatrack. And the A4 and OT have way too many key combos that I cannot remember that are obviated on Monomachine’s ‘super copy’ menu.

Sound management on the Monomachine has not bugged me nearly as much as it bugs others. It’s strange. (Plus I think lack of big sound management on Monomachine has ennobled me to explore making my sounds more quickly and easily than on the A4 where there’s a strange tug between “should I make my own from scratch, or use a preset, or use a preset as a starting point but then do I save over the preset or make something new and which bank should I be putting my sounds in?” - but A4 is still new to me and I’m still getting used to it).

Plus I can milk a lot out of the MM’s sequencer still :slight_smile: But I would welcome modern functionality for sure.

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#12

I’ve been sequencing my monomachine with my digitakt, quite nice to have some of the more updated elektron sequencer features working the monomachine

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#13

The crux of my gripe is that the sounds only reside in kits.
Therefore to copy a sound, one must navigate to one pattern that is linked to a kit, copy, then go back to your active composition kit/pattern, and paste it. The kit system becomes the de facto sound browser, a side effect to a great multi-timbral patch system.
Compared to newer Elektrons, this is dated and clunky.

There is value in ignoring the whole importing of existing sounds in rolling your own each and every time, I do not deny that, but there is also value in a more elegant system where sounds are tagged, organized. searchable, and instantly accessed.
Often, the creative process can keep sound design and composition very much separate, and this is a workflow that doesn’t mesh well with the MM kit-centric patch system, but is well served on A4/K/R.

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#14

Yeah I had this too. That feeling is present in any synth with presets but I found it especially frustrating with the A4.

#15

Sold mine a long time ago, the main issues I had were the ‘all or nothing’ poly implementation, the need to sacrifice a track to add more effects, lack of algorithmic FM, and the single option sub-menus which seemed to promise but ultimately never delivered the addition of more machines. :wink:

None of these are barriers if you like the sound and workflow though.

#16

get the mnm mk2 with your trade, and smile. you’ll be in for a long, slow, satisfying ride — if you have the patience.

as someone said above, it’s not an instant gratification box. even less so than the other elektrons you’ve experienced — all of which take considerable time and effort. (i come from the acoustic instrument world, so this has never bothered me, but.)

its architecture is not intuitive. not to me at least. if i hadn’t spent many hours digging into features like the bus system and the arp, i might have sold it long ago.

you likely will be forced to come up with unorthodox solutions to issues like @AdamJay mentions. polyrhythms, microtiming, sound management are a hassle compared to other synths. but as previous owners have discovered years ago, there are solutions to them. you just have to spend more time and effort conceiving and implementing them. (you also have an OT, so you can get around the conditional trigs issue if you so choose.)

@Veets is a far more accomplished mnm jedi than i am, and i remember he once compared the mnm to a foreign-born hottie who lives in your building. she doesn’t speak your language well, nor does she fully grok your culture, so it’s largely up to you to make the relationship work. well put, sez me.

2 Likes
#17

The biggest one for me is the lack of individual pattern lengths/multipliers and microtiming, as others have said. Conditional trigs would be nice, but being stuck with everything at one speed and length is pretty limiting.

I’m still not used to the gain staging either, especially when using effects machines. There doesn’t seem to be much headroom internally. That said, it may be my error; perhaps I need to turn the master volume up and work at lower volumes per track.

Yeah I think I need to do this with the Octatrack. At the moment though, I’m more interested in making full tracks using single machines. I’ve had the OT for nearly a year and still haven’t used it with the monomachine… even for effects/resampling.

#18

My biggest problem is finding them used with a Dick Malibu black panel…

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#19

Thanks all, interesting points here !
I’ll probably find workarounds for some of them.
Using the OT as master with an event processor unfolds so many possibilities…
Waiting until this evening to see if something “new” unveils in the realm of digital synthesis boxes.

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#20

This is all pretty much my main beef with the MM. However, I already sold it once and bought another a month later, so I’ll never sell it again unless we get something that has everything the MM has but updated.