Local guy is selling Machinedrum for 400 EUR (around $500). I love how it looks, but I’m not a fan of synthesised drum sounds in general — I own a drumbrute (which is a disappointment) and I hate 808, 909 type of sounds. I own Digitakt, which I use as a drum machine + it drives my eurorack, but I really miss separate outs for drums (I have a lot of outboard gear to wet into). I know Machinedrum is different beast from Digitakt — one is a sampler, the other is a digital synthesiser.
I mostly work on ambient/IDM kind of tracks (no hip-hop/techno/house) and I really like glitchy/lofi type of music: Aphex Twin, BoC, Plaid, etc.
Things I love in Digitakt:
Sequencer with conditional trigs.
Separate 8 midi channels to run my eurorack.
Things I hate about Digitakt:
No separate outs to run bass, snare into the mixer.
No separate mute buttons (a lot of menu diving and different overlapping modes)
My questions basically are:
Is 400 EUR a good price for it?
What am I missing if I replace Digitakt with Machinedrum (for certain tracks only)?
As you say they are very different beasts. I have both and wouldn’t part with either. The flexibility of the in and outputs on the MD along with the lfos being assignable to different tracks is great. The MD has its limits but it gets interesting when you start to push its limits.
400 euro seems like a great price. I doubt you would lose money on it if it doesn’t click with you.
For this price, take it (if unit function normaly) you won’t regret it. If you don’t like it (would be surprising if you like glitch) you always find a buyer, cause this drum machine is one of the best on earth.
The machinedrum is still the best product elektron has made. Fully set of features (looking at you rytm with no midi) and its elegant to use. It can serve as a brain of a set up or a switch army knife of functionality. You should find this very helpful.
I currently only use mine as a fancy midi controller for a few synths and limited sampling of things (thru aux send). 16 lfos is no joke if you have a synth with lots of cc control. Drums have been moved to the rytm if youre wondering why i dont use its synth engine often.
Love my MD! It was one of the first machines to get me back into making music. The workflow is pretty quick when you’ve used one for awhile and the live resampling on the UW is great for layering percussion, getting glitchy wid it. Digitakt looks dope, but MD has a lot of depth to it.
One of the best Drum Machines ever made, hands down.
You can mute any of the sequencer tracks in this mode. Unlike the CHROMATIC mode, it makes no dif- ference which track is active when this mode is activated. You can access all tracks simultaneously.
Make sure a pattern is playing.
Press the [FUNC] + [BANK] key to enter MUTE mode.
Press any of the [TRIG] keys to mute the corresponding track. Press again to unmute. The light of the [TRIG] keys indicates the mute status. Unlit keys are muted tracks. Lit keys are active tracks.
You need to spend more time reading the manual…or watch some vids on Youtube! I had the MD for a while, and it is going to take LOT of time spent with it to vibe on it! The Digi on the other hand, is fluid like mercury in comparison.
You have to like MD drum synthesis.
UW version, you can resample, change pitch / retrig realtime with RAM machines.
I’d sequence it with the DT for cond trigs.
I sequence my MD with Octatrack.
I much prefer OT (48 lfos, crossfader, 8 recorders, looper, long stereo samples, trc…)
Glitch heaven.
Thank you for your input. I’m aware of the way it works and I’m just not happy with the way Digitakt approaches this.
I’ve been using Drumbrute for about 6 months before jumping to Digitakt and as much as I appreciate the Digitakt’s sequencer, I think Drumbrute is much more performance oriented. Usually I play guitar and/or keys and switching patterns and muting would be much more convenient with single button press: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYhkVrmPZ_M
I really appreciate your everyone’s input guys. I’ll probably take it if I won’t get beaten to it. I just don’t like 808 and 909 sound pretending to be a real drums. I love that MD can create totally weird sounding percussion.
On AudioFanzine, French référence for second hand gear, 400€ is exactly the price for a SPS-1.
So price is right, I believe.
But if you are ready to put up to 700€ I would definitely go for the finest mk2 UW+