Your perspective on it is great, you’re very right about the FMness of it and getting crazy, staging and routing, it can be any type of instrument almost.
Your perspective though, is yours, and this is for people to read and consider the MD.
That being said,
I’ve been able to get great traditional sounding kits out of the MD with proper routing within the box, and I absolutely would recommend it to anyone who is willing to devote a little more time to the box. The cold sterile sound, is there, if you want it to be. You can get oomph, you can get normal, you can get weird, and you can get traditional with the MD.
very true, and with the new firmwares it is easier than ever to manipulate and sculpt the sounds to your will. in many ways its like a little daw posing as a drum machine and i enjoy using it has the master control in my jams.
Do you guys really think MM and MD reissues would sell well? I guess it´s fair to assume - and please correct me if I´m wrong, but it´s not going to be easy to bring them back. With an analog reissue, worst that can happen is vital parts of the audio path aren´t available anymore and you´ll end up using several modern parts as replacements. That means many hours of carefully selecting parts, fine tuning everything etc.
But in any case you´ll have several people in the company that understand the schematics and can work from that.
In the digital world, things change so fast, I don´t know if there are still people working for Elektron that have worked with the code or can understand the code. What MCU´s are in the silver boxes? Is there an easy way to port the code? Probably not?
I mean sure, the Elektron fans would want to buy them, the 90s aesthetics is highly regarded by people working in many different genres, but for reissues to become a (business) success, they´d have to appeal to the masses. And here, I think comes the problem of overlapping features. If you take away the nostalgia and some special features, MD would have to compete with AR and Syntakt, MM with DN, Syntakt and probably A4 and M:C, too!
Then the old OS will probably feel a bit stiff compared to newer features like different track lengths, multi-trig editing, trig conditions etc. So the question arises if they´d do a reissue or a modern incarnation.
My impression of Elektron is that they are constantly moving on rather than doing what’s most profitable at the time. But if I’m wrong I guess we can expect both what you mentioned and an OT3.
Machinedrum is my favorite Elektron product. I really hope they come out with something that continues where it left off. Even with how old it is, to me, it still has more features than the current drum machines, and I love its sound. Really the only features I would like to see added would be more sample time, a usb port for transferring samples and sysex files, chromatic pitch, and a slice mode for the sampler, improved midi clock(jitter). Of course new machines would be cool too. It’s odd to me that there isn’t a digital drum machine to replace it. I was hoping that Syntakt would have some elements of the MD, but it is totally different, and while it sounds great, it is limited in my opinion, in comparison to the MD. (No cross track LFO routing, no sampling, no sample rate or bit reduction per track, much less machines etc…) Even if Elektron re-issued it (and mnm) with no new features, I think they would still be some of the best sellers, because they are still probably the most flexible and powerful boxes. The current flagships are very cool, but are just a lot more limited, and I know this is subjective, but I prefer the sound of the digital boxes too.
I think the answer to this problem is 1. for Elektron to add a whole lot more machines and effects to Syntakt and 2. You add an octatrack to whatever machine that Syntakt becomes
But something tells me that a lot of these desires will be addressed in a new flagship on their new platform
Yeah basically, the thing that makes this a toughie is that Elektron still hasn’t released boxes to surpass these. If they dropped TODAY they’d legitimately be more futuristic and advanced than over half of their current lineup. Sure the OT, AR, and A4 are deep and grand instruments but they’re quite different and I don’t think necessarily compete the way some people insist. The MD and AR are entirely different machines in my opinion, same with the MnM and A4. Even the syntakt really doesn’t come close. I think that’s what frustrates me with Elektron sometimes, it seems like their business model has fully shifted towards these bite sized boxes and while they’re fun and very easy to get into, I wonder if they haven’t lost a degree of ambition and forward thinking that made them the company they are.
Btw, isn´t the LFO mix on the Machinedrum basically the same as having two individual LFOs and balancing the “mix” by dialing in the LFO depth on both? Having two distinct LFOS of course would also allow for more options, different speeds and trig modes for example and also phase offset on all Elektrons after the Octatrack.
The mix basically allows you to blend 2 LFO shapes, but I still think of it as 1 LFO, because it’s a single source. In my opinion, just having the ability to route the LFO’s between tracks, like on the MD is super useful, because, if you want any LFO’s for 1 sound, you have that option.
That kind of eliminates the possibility of individual patch storage though… which imo beats out the shared lfo option. Maybe some global lfos that are saved with a sequence/pattern in tandem with the per sound lfos. It all seems to boarder on being convoluted though, why not just have more lfos per track if the design calls for it.
I agree with you on that. Really the best Elektron box for LFOs is Octatrack. I guess the reason I like the cross track LFO’s in MD is just that it’s basically a workaround to the limitation of only having 1 per track.
