Can Elektron please start selling MachineDrums again?

Elektron Gear Machinedrum
#272

The point is, it’s about personal preference. There’s probably tons of people that consider themselves allergic to anything that calls itself “reference manual”, or looks like one.

Just gimme keys and some knobs and tape then I can mark my favourite knob positions kinda style. They make up with playing, or maybe not. They might just enjoy a simple instrument.

If you consider yourself a musician (hohoho), you probably have some artistic vision - or maybe you just like music, but aren’t interested in the technical side of things, so you don’t give an F about all those terms, what they meam, how they work and whatnot.

There’s no feature set that automatically blows some other device. Man, could things be simple…Elektron would still sell the silver boxes and make tons of money off them, Roland would bring back their classic machines…

Personally, I don’t get it why people shit on manufacturers if they don’t like an instrument or maybe even only certain aspects of it.
Obviously not directed at you, but we had some recent threads that seemed to entertain the notion that some instruments are now is obsolete, because of the new best thing in town.

It’s all in the mind, you know?
Could be?
Possibly maybe?

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#273

with MD’s being as cheap as they have been in a loooooooog time, y’all should be posting in What’s your latest purchase & what are your intentions with it? [pics ftw] (Part 2) instead of here.

#274

26 lfos per track vs 16 per track or more like 2 vs 16? Can you route lfos on other tracks like you can on the MD?

#275

OT = 3 LFO per track
MD = 1 LFO per track [or] 1-16 LFOs for 1 track. an LFO can only affect a single track. so you can disperse them as you like. but there is just 16 total.

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#276

16 for 1 track, and 0 for others ?
Not for me. I usually need at least one per track. And as you need lfos for “attack envelope”…:wink:

MD free lfo routing is great on paper, and trust me, I tested lots of lfo configurations, including lfos on CTR ALL machine etc, but it was always frustrating compare to the 48 OT lfos (3 per audio track is confortable).

Midi loopback: up to 15 lfos for 1 track on ST, 27 for OT…:pl:

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#277

loopback is fucked unless you do some filtering. you can mess shit up pretty bad [not damage mess up, just sounding like shit messed up. but im sure you are WELL aware]

#278

Works great on OT and afaik on the others as well (not 100% sure about that, tho. Does it?)

On the Octa, if an audio track and a MIDI track share the same MIDI channel, the MIDI track will block the audio track from sending out data while the audio track will block the MIDI track from receiving data.

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#279

Hold lfos for instance…
Otherwise yes, more than 3 doesn’t seem reasonable. :content:

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#280

I sold my md a while ago and I have never been interested in the Syntakt. I just don’t like how the Sntk sounds and to me it’s not as flexible as the md and miss the character of the AR, but that’s subjective.

I was just asking because I read 26 lfos and I thought you could route lfos like you can on the md. Well, anyway even having 4 lfos on a track vs 2 opens up a lot of sound design possibilities.

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#281

Afaik MD is the only Elektron that can do it, but it gets more complicated if you want to add lfos to midi machines (you need a CTR 8P machine iirc).

Lfos on CTR ALL machine is excellent!

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#282

PI machines.

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#283

Hopefully we don’t have to wait as long.

#284

Pardon my ignorance, I’m relatively new to Elektron gear - my first one was Analog Heat mk2 - but why have Elektron abandoned those Machine Drums’s skills everybody praise?

I mean, why haven’t they build on what they already had and is clearly something everybody likes?

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#285

here is an old quote posted on the original elekton forums by jesper; one of the designers of the silver boxes. it reveals some of the dynamics at play that lead to where we are now.

Hi all,

This is Jesper from Teenage Engineering.

Sometimes I check this forum to see what you Elektron users are up to.
It is always interesting, especially for me who have been working on some of the Elektron machines as a designer. I love that you comment on all kinds of stuff, have feature requests, get mad about details etc.

I never write comments on forums, so this is the one and only exception.
I do it because I want you Elektron users to get the background story of the OP-1. And to clear things out a little bit in this thread.

Around 1999/2000 I was doing the final work on the MonoMachine and had daily discussions with Daniel Hansson about what machine to do next. I told Daniel about my dream of a machine I have sketched on, based on the Roland SH-101 but in a pocket format. Daniel loved the idea, but was concerned about the battery power and the overall performance of a machine in that size. Remember that this was 10 years ago, and the technology wasn’t quite there yet. So he told me to continue to sketch up a concept, but keep it more or less outside Elektron.

Anyway, I started to work on the machine as a side project. (Daniel and the Elektron team had another vision about a more live / dj sampling machine (UW that later bacame the Octatrack I guess) I did a lot of sketches of the functionality and renderings. And finally Daniel called me one day and said Elektron had a collaboration with Evolution to make a portable machine / controller. As you might guessed, when we presented the stuff, they thought we were insane and rejected all of it. It was too expensive. Impossible to manufacture, no clear target group etc. That could have been the end of story, but it wasn’t.

As some of you know a tragic incident happend a few years later. In 2007 Daniel died in a car accident. He was one of my best friends and it was a great loss. He had called me just a couple of weeks before and wanted to show me a sketch of a new machine he had been working on for some time. (I don’t know what he had in mind, but I guess the Octatrack is in a close direction, even if I know there’s at least one other great talent behind that machine.)

At that time me and some friends had just started Teenage Engineering. I was still doing some work for Elektron, but when Daniel passed away, it wasn’t just the same for me and I guess Elektron also wanted move on and build a strong team in Gotheburg, which I think was right. So the opportunity the make a portable machine was more or less gone.

All this came to a conclusion. If we don’t make this machine ourselfs, no one else will. So we have put all our effort, time and money to make this machine real.
In many ways as a tribute to Elektron, but also to make a a 10 year old dream to make an extraordinary instrument come true.

With that said, I just want you to know how emotional a project like this is. It’s not about business or being smart or about money. It’s your life. We do this because we love it.
We have dreamed about this machine and it’s functions for so many years. We have all put a large piece of ourselfs into this. This of course makes us sensitve for speculations etc.
I guess the above applies for the Elektron team as well.

So… let us clear things out.

No, it’s not a clever marketing strategy lending out an OP-1 pre-production unit to a House Mafia band. They just wanted to use it as a prop in their vid. And it ended up as the center piece of the video. We had nothing to say about it. And of course the track wasn’t made on the OP-1. It isn’t out yet. And yes, you can create a song like that (why do someone who has never touched an OP-1 write things like "that’s not possible to do on an OP-1?). Come on… it’s not that hard. And remember that the OP-1 is also a controller, so it’s nothing wrong to visually connect the OP-1 with a song made in Logic.

Keep up the good work Elektron.

-Jesper

so basically creative differences from the original team and death of daniel leading to the creation of teenage engineering

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#286

also you never know if it wont happen some day; it took roland decades to recreate their original drum machines despite that being the main thing people wanted

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#287

tr09 is not a tr909
tr08 is not a tr808

a machinedrum is a machinedrum,
simply end of story

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#288

Didn’t take Behringer that long and did a far better job.

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#289

Because people tend to praise things that are out of production, and romanticize about things that are rare or hard to obtain :wink:

All the more recent Elektron synths/samplers/grooveboxes build and improve on the MD to some extent. Some features/implementations were abandoned along the way, many more were added, The MD certainly set the «Elektron mould».

That doesn’t mean the MD isn’t a unique instrument with its own character and sound, in fact it’s groundbreaking in some respects.

There may be many reasons why Elektron stopped production. It was in production for 14 or 15 years I think, which is quite a long time. So maybe obsolete parts? Increased production costs? Slow sales? Time to move on to new products? I’m not sure.

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#290

But I’m not talking about keep making the same gear. I’m talking about keep implementing capabilities that everybody likes on new gear.

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#291

Here I thought it was all of those endless “Do I get the MD or do I get the AR” threads (and sales) that always seemed to go AR

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