Through my journey collecting various peices of gear I’ve always been searching for a workflow that was a little more hands-on and tactile than a DAW. I naturally gravitated twards Elektron stuff because of the hands-on nature and flexibility of it’s sequencer. It is fantastic when working with one single unit. I’ve really enjoyed the stuff I’ve made on the DN Keys and the A4 seperately. Once I need to mix these multiple instruments and and have them play nicely together I’ve gotten deep into the weeds trying to actually songwrite with this thing.
Once I hooked up the A4 MKII with the DN Keys to utilize song mode and got a Roland XV-5080 as well, I’m now second guessing my approach. You see, I’m constantly trying to wrestle with sequencing these things cleanly and trying to arrange more complex peices of music with more polyphony and I’m just wondering if I’ve been going about this all the wrong way. Currently I have a Digitone Keys as a master keyboard with the A4 controlling automation (for song mode). All 4 of DN’s MIDI channels are controlling the XV-5080.
All this is feeding into my daw using my interface / daw as my mixer. Since there is so much of the 5080 still untapped I was thinking about getting either an OT or DT and feeding all its 8 MIDI channels into the XV for a total of 12 MIDI sequenced tracks controlling the 5080… but at that point, didn’t I just basically make some sort of Rube Goldburg workstation?
I’ve always used these more as song writing tools rather than performance tools. Before the A4 the performance aspects of the DN were more out of necesity due to lack of song mode. I now look at things like the Roland Fantom and think that it has everything I’m trying to accomplish wrapped up in a neat little package and I’d songwriting would be way less of a headache if I had something like a modern workstation. I make cheesy video game / rompler music anyway so wouldn’t it just make more sense?
For a frame of refference here’s the last song I made with the whole setup.
It’s probably 75% the Roland rompler and I love how cheesy and late-90s capcom it sounds. Outside of the gorgeous analog sounds I’d lose without the A4, what would I be losing if I went with something like the Fantom? I’d imagine I’d be able to have much more complex arrangements with that than my current setup… but maybe if I practice I could work around the limitations of the 64-step limit and I really just need to get the hang of chaining more together for longer melodies and chord progressions and stuff like that?