Indeed, I am very happy for you and your Elektron skills! And thank you for showing your concerns about not liking my despair. Albeit, for a selfish reason of trying to dispel a myth that is personal to you. 
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I think where I’m struggling, after a few years, with the Elektron analogue boxes, is that I find they need a lot of processing. Processing I’d normally do in a DAW.
Makes using them live, a bit less viable for me.
Pre-processed samples loaded into the sample supporting units is one way to go, but A4 and AK are proving to be difficult for me to tame on-stage.
That’s the same problem I have with almost any analogue sound source though. 
This is my problem with the Digitakt. Having to remember a song’s intended pattern order, and which knobs to turn when, is not analogous to playing a piano.
How can people even remember what samples are assigned, across multiple patterns? On a piano, you hit a key and it sounds a note. Change songs, and the same key gives you that same note! Come back in a week, press that key, and guess what? The piano is an instrument, and you can learn it.
Elektron makes programmable computers. Everything about them screams “program me,” except when it comes to structure. There’s no logical explanation. These are shortcomings, not benefits. Buyer beware.
[edit: sorry, I shouldn’t make blanket statements about Elektron boxes… I only have direct experience with the DT. All other knowledge is from YouTube, which is to say, I don’t know the first thing about them!]
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Yeah, I’m still amazed by it. But watch this set by Ezbot (https://youtu.be/G_16tuhdiwM). It must be doable. Practice makes perfect?
I started on DT and realized I can’t remember all those steps! But when I got ARM2 it was somewhat better with the Song Mode. Maybe we just need to give ourselves into the box and let it eat our souls and be one with it. Borg-ified! 
EDIT: watch his transition from one song to the other. How???
Elektron has generated enough goodwill that people want to give their product team the benefit of the doubt. Like, if there’s no song mode on a product, there must be a good reason, then fill in the blank.
I work in the software industry. There are always trade-offs, cost analyses, time-to-market considerations, a hundred reasons why good features aren’t included in a release. Sometimes it’s the infinite wisdom of the designer, but more often than not, it’s not.
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Just write it down! That’s how people “remember” songs on the piano.
I have a notebook and I write down the samples, parts, and any notes I need, plus (for Digitakt) pattern order for songs.
Also very handy when you come back to it in the future.
I see the point of your piano analogy, but I think the piano keys are the knobs and buttons, whereas the samples you load are more like the score. And you can totally learn what all the buttons do.
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Maybe have a system like T1 is always the kick etc.
Sure, writing these things down is the solution, and I do it too.
Regarding this piano analogy, a more accurate comparison might be, if, for each song, you had to write down the piano’s location in your house…
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I am glad you’ve started this thread. As a new entrant into the world of Elektron, having recently purchased a Model:Samples and then both an A4MKII and an OTMKII, I was/am beginning to regret the OT purchase. For the OT, I’ve read most of the manual, read Merlin’s guide, watched numerous YT and AskVideo videos and committed myself to spending at least 30 to 90 minutes a day on it for a couple of months. Then, I took a break to focus on some personal stuff. I came back to the A4, no real issues getting back into it. With the OT, I was pretty much lost. Sure, I could limp along, and find my way back into what I had learned, but so many ways of doing things on the OT are just not intuitive, I found it very frustrating, and felt, well, dumb. My partner suggested that I might just need to be more dedicated to using it regularly. Maybe. Or maybe I am just not sufficiently dedicated to it to justify having it. I can return to my Korg Kronos, my MatrixBrute, my MPC One and other synths and instruments I have, including my VSTs and fly into them when I haven’t used them for a while after just a bit of reorienting. Not so with the OT. Some might think this is great. I am not so sure it is.
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I find the whole ooooh Elektron is so hard to learn stuff a bit OTT.
I learnt Digitakt in a week and was up and running with an Octatrack the same day as I got it (it admittedly took a bit longer to get my head round the more complex stuff). Not being a show off, I really think it depends on your music experience as to how hard you find it.
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Totally. I have to remember that I’ve used hundreds of different bits of software and hardware as music tech journalist back in the day and I love reading manuals for gear that I’m thinking about buying. Others might not get concepts I just take for granted nowadays. Still, best advice, RTFM first, search the forum second, ask questions here third. The ‘Nauts will always have your back
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You must have a pretty big house 
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True, DT is a performance oriented groovebox. This is the reason why could be very good play a pair of it with a DJ mixer, a setup I’m more and more thinking about, for when I’ll be more able to use DT and I’ll have more time for practice (I’m aware this moment may never arrive… but who knows?)
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Yeah, the idea I think is either you get intimately familiar with your “set” so you can pick and choose patterns on a whim or you just set them up in order and your chain is a mindless run across the trigs. Using the change length feature it’s like a very basic song mode.
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Exactly, they were made for live performances, but there’s nothing that stops us from using them in any way we want. It just helps to understand what they were designed for originally when the feelings of frustrations about their shortcomings start to bubble up.
Yes, that’s actually something that makes the Digitone/Digitakt a lot more useful in live performances. I bought a Keystep 37 and programmed the knobs to control different mod wheel movements on separate midi channels, and then I made use of the excellent mod wheel assignment feature in the DN/DT, which allows you to control several parameters with just one modulation control. This was what I used predominantly to perform one of my songs, and it worked well and make it a lot easier to remember. This is one way of “writing down” the part about which knobs to turn when - if you program your midi controller to send mod wheel midi cc’s for the channels you want to tweak, you can then save which parameters they control on a per-project basis on the DT/DN.
That’s the thing, really - it can be both! I think that loving Elektron boxes starts with acknowledging their deliberate limitations and using them for what they were made for.
I like to think of the instrument analog again: my brother plays guitars and he owns several electric guitars. As far as I know, he has never “finished” writing a song. He enjoys playing with his guitar, so for him, each “session” is a live jam.
With that as a baseline, Elektron offers SO much more since it basically allows you to program an entire song structure with self-playing drums, synths, bass, etc. The “only” thing you have to do yourself is remember to press certain patterns in a certain order, and twist some knobs in a certain way, at a certain time. Usually it takes me playing the patterns a couple of times until I remember how the whole song was meant to be played. It’s really not that hard. It’s when you compare it against a “proper” groovebox that it starts to feel extremely limiting and/or frustrating. Thinking of it as an instrument is a way to avoid those emotions of frustrations, I guess.
I’m different from my brother in that I enjoy creating full songs, and I get a lot of energy from completing and perfecting a song. The Elektron boxes enable me to make a giant initial leap into creative territory, but they just aren’t the boxes that will take me through to the finish line. Meanwhile, my brother couldn’t care less about that finish line…
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What genre do you all normally work in? I think that’s a bit of context that’s important to how you relate to these machines.
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The key here, I’m told, is structure and templates. The more you use them, the more you will figure out what works for you. For me, the last couple of “songs” I’ve made, I’ve created the patterns in a sequence - 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, with the original pattern stored at slot 16 just in case.
Regarding remembering which knobs to turn when, it’s actually a lot simpler than my left-side part of the brain makes it sound like. I typically need to play a couple of patterns of a song, and it all comes back to me.
There’s some truth to this, most notably how you feel about it. The thing I’d say is that there is a logical explanation: they were made for live performances, not for finalizing songs. Think of it as an electric guitar with a pedal that can perform different harmonics and distortion. Those are also meant to be “played”, and there’s no one that would expect the guitar and pedal to save their states as project files for us to automatically play the song back for us later. This doesn’t mean you can’t use an electric guitar in a finished song, of course. Just like you can use an Elektron in a finished song. You just need a few more tools to get the job done.
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At no point in time have I felt a sense of despair due to my ownership of an Elektron instrument. I was lost at that choice for words.
It may be time for some self reflection if owning a musical instrument designed to fuel creativity is the source of stress and unhappiness. Comparing Elektron ownership to the loss of a loved one, or a house fire where you lost everything you worked for over the course of decades is, uh, a little weird and possibly unfair.
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One more thing I’ll add here - this is just my subjective opinion, of course: the Digitakt and Digitone just sound so good. The song embryos I’ve made on them mostly sound great out of the box, completely without any real mixing effort (other than the basic 2nd page band filters and levels). On top of the punchy sound quality, the way they spit out surprisingly creative and unexpected sounds makes me feel empowered, as if someone is actively listening to my song ideas and adding something on top of them.
In case anyone wonders, I would place my genre somewhere between electronica and trance, depending on the mood of the day. If I were a well-paid artist, I would have loved making music solely on these two Elektron boxes. And I wouldn’t worry as much about finishing the songs, because I’d have an entourage of other people who would help me with that in the studio. So I’d just happily create all my patterns and perform a few takes in the studio, and then someone else would do the magic of stitching it all up in better ways than I could imagine myself.
But I’m not a well-paid artist - so I need to actually finish my songs myself. 
And, that part of finishing the song feels important to me. As a result, the Elektron boxes aren’t quite for me, and this is why I bought the MPC One. With all that said, the Elektron boxes taught me something new about music making. The Digitakt made me think of drums and rhythm in a different way, and, now that I’m making music mostly on the MPC, I take the time to add in more organic variations, and small things that add to the overall feel of the beat.
Similarly, the Digitone taught me the joy of constantly progressing synthesizer sounds, and it made me think much more about how to change the energy over the course of an entire song. I no longer just open up a filter here and there - instead, I think about all sorts of parameters of the synthesizer, such as decay, release, all sorts of modulations, etc etc. As a result, my sounds are more interesting than ever.
Lastly, overall, Elektron made me more sensitive to the emotions I get when making music. Those are invaluable lessons that I’ll keep with me for as long as I continue with this wonderful hobby.
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IMO i definitely can understand the despair 
♂, I actually really appreciate the parsed down nature of the digitakt, as song mode was something that i continued to ignore on both the MDUW and MM that I owned moons ago.
Which on it’s own isn’t something to despair, but whenever there’s features or modes that I never use on something I can’t help but feel like I am not using it to the “optimum” potential.
I do think that all of the Elektron devices I’ve tried do tend to have both a very approachable interface but it can feel overwhelming and difficult as well. But again that could be a user issue 
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