This is where I’m at with my Elektron boxes. I should give in to it and leave all the finished songs that plays back exactly on a button press to my MPC. With the ARM2 it is slightly easier of course, with it’s Song Mode.
I just wish I could justify keeping all devices because the jamming part on the Digitakt/Digitone is pure fun. But I can’t really justify it after switching to the MPC. I’ll probably just keep the lessons learned about music making and pass the DT/DN on to someone who is more into live jamming.
Where does this innate need to create these artificial pairs of “enemies” come from? The Beatles vs The Stones, Blur vs Oasis, Mac vs PC, Elektron vs MPC.
I’ve always preferred The Beatles and the Blur naturally but in my studio my MPC Live II Retro lives in complete peace and harmony with my Digitakt & Digitone (and the Analog Keys). They even speak to each other. They’re not enemies in any way. They each have their individual strengths, weaknesses and use cases. I’m so tired of this culture of two tribes in everything: politics, music and now even gear.
I’ve never used Splice, owning an MPC doesn’t automatically mean that I do simplistic things from prefab loops. It’s just lazy to claim that it does. Sorry, needed to vent a little.
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Relate. It’s exhausting and divisive… 
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Hi fella. I hear you but I’d also counterpoint that you can still get much excitement out of the boxes I own after just half an hour, even just utilising the demo material for shits & giggles!
I actually think that nearly everyone in this thread has compared the two and identified pros and cons with each.
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I think you said it. It’s innate. It’s just something about how people relate to one another once we find ourselves in groups. It works its way into everything to some extent but if ever there was a place for that to go that’s more harmless than Stones vs Beatles, it’s whether or not the Octatrack is cooler than the MPC Live II.
I think you’re ultimately right though that we shouldn’t see them like sports teams. They’re clearly Pokemon. The goal is to be the very best and catch them all.
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Gosh… I DO! I get so much joy from it (even when in despair because I am still trying to wrap my head around Elektron’s kits, sounds, projects) that I just bought an A4M2. 
And no, I’m not into some BDSM pleasure-from-pain kind of thing. I am merely illustrating my own personal journey back to Elektron and giving a POV that this time around I am approaching it as a musical instrument more like a piano/guitar/cello - rather than a groovebox/DAWless box which I was accustomed to coming from Roland’s Grooveboxes and Akai’s MPCs.
I guess it all got lost in translation, as the OP got modded for writing form, and misconstrued for syntax. 
Any-hoo… I still hope this thread was helpful to someone researching into jumping into Elektron for the first time, or for someone like me who left and came back even more committed to it.
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They’re just little boxes we use to create, manipulate, and organize sounds. Who cares what box anyone prefers? The point is to enjoy the journey and if we’re lucky, the result is something we (and possibly others) enjoy listening to. No big deal really… 
After I learned the Monomachine the Elektron workflow always just made sense to me. I’ve not tried an OT but the MD, M:S, A4, Digitakt…I was all good, all made sense pretty immediately.
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man the elektron and mpc workflows compliment each other so much that I couldn’t have any core faults with the combination even if I tried… imho they are that relationship goals couple you see in the park 
and with the elektrons overbridge and the MPC’s Ableton export it just make’s each homie a better homie
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the og thread is long and interesting in the same way but i think this is not fair
everything could be a musical instrument and/or art, if mastered and played the right way!
for some reason is a guitar for one, drumset for others, piano, voice, sax, samplers, drum machines, elektron, akai, roland, etc etc
the main goal to me, is find what give us peace and happyness and accept that others can found that too in a very different way
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I don’t have any experiences with other grooveboxes but I had the first Maschine and I’m an Ableton user. What I really love about my Digitakt and Digitone is, that you have a really large but still restricted set of tools that can be combined in nearly infinite ways and everything makes total sense. Also these “ways” grow exponentially with every update. I’m constantly blown away by these YT videos and your forum posts that show me new possibilities.
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I would listen to your partner. If you stick with it, at some point it will all click and you wont regret your dedication. I guess depending on what you are trying to accomplish with it. There are definitely people who dislike the OT as well. I thought from a previous thread that you had already oved on. Anyways, good luck
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I hadn’t made a decision to move on. You might be thinking of @Gino who discussed this in a different thread I Participated in. He took a quick deep dive into it, found a lot of cool stuff, but I think decided it didn’t work in his workflow (not trying to speak for him). I am not ready to throw in the towel, but can see this spending a lot of time unused due to the “dread” of trying to get past it’s counterintuitive and nonintuitive way of working and the “hump” of having to relearn how to get around and do even pretty basic stuff in it when I haven’t used it for a few weeks… Funny that I don’t feel this way at all about the Analog 4 (other than the way sounds are stored).
This gave me a chuckle. Thanks!
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Last night I went through and deleted all of my projects on the OT except for one named FLEXLOOP. I had so many different ones saved from shit techno, acid, ambient, ect. None of them were good and all of them were attempts at replicating what I thought this machine should excel at, which was basically the idea of it being a song building DAW box. Coming from tape loops and electroacoustic noise stuff I decided it would suite me best to focus on just one bit at a time rather then trying to be something I’m not and trying to milk this machine to make something that I really have little interest in making. I’m going to continue using it as a performance looper/mixer and building up the sample library on it. I think this way will make it feel like more of an “instrument” to me.
The other Elektron box I have is the A4, which I only really program stuff into. Its versatile as hell, and I can get lost in it for sure. It does not feel like as much of an instrument to me though, and I could not really imagine taking it out for the kind of live sets I generally do. I’m sure it could be used this way, and I felt it was more of an instrument when used in a project with a midi keyboard and just playing 4 note chords and ambient pads. I think its the sheer limitlessness of the A4 that really scrambles my head and just makes me lost and frustrated.
I guess this is to say that for me, approach and mindset are everything in defining the lens which we view these machines through
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So, I’m now at a happy place with “despair” in the horizon as I just received my A4M2. Just playing the factory presets alone screams WHOA! Gonna be weeks of tears interspersed with joy learning this new beast.
And thank you to everyone that participated in this thread. Some are more encouraging and I appreciate that. And some got lost in translation, well… it is what it is.
Makes a beautiful family portrait… 
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Nice setup!
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Elevated the Digitakt with the Varidock VESA system. I love how it works so well together! It’s gives a mechanical skeleton to a digital soul with its black steel framing.
The A4M2 is just simply divine. It has such warmth (and warm to the touch after a few hours; probably from the analog circuitry inside) and all that fuzziness in its timbre. Spent a few minutes swapping position AR > A4 and back, and finally settled on this as it was more comfortable for me to mute/unmute with my left-hand on the AR, plus the screen position kinda mirrored each other making it a lot easier to view both.
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