I am fairly new to the Elektron world, but not a complete noob anymore. Anyway… Wondering about how you record your tracks? I am coming from the Ableton world and now I hang in between the hard- and software world. To bridge that, there is overbridge right? I am using RYTM and A4.
Currently I am using still Ableton to use its effects. I successfully split the tracks from the A4 and RYTM via Overbridge from the effects channel, so that I have each track “dry” and then one effects channel for A4 and RYTM each.
The whole idea of overbridge is, to have separate tracks via USB for later tweaking. But if I do that, the effects track will not necessarily match anymore.
So is the general advice to not use the internal Elektron effects in such a setup?
I had a horrible “workflow” putting the effects coming from the Elektrons back to each track in Ableton. No fun. No flow. Just resampling each track per track in Ableton with the effects coming from Elektron (all other tracks were muted for that moment).
Anyway… Hard to describe.
Would you give me some advice how to best record your work into a DAW? Or do I have to complete leave DAW world and go with an octatrack?
With the transition to hardware gear I hoped for a more intuitive workflow, coming more naturally. But I find myself in a more unintuitive setup now. Effects in Ableton, loading samples from DAW into RYTM (tried to avoid, but the results from the synths in RYTM were not always satisfying and hard to achieve).
Any general advice about how you approach your work?
I think if I would use overbridge the way you describe, recreating fx in ableton, I would start like this to begin with. Pro= lots of control, con= no happy playing with fx on elektron.
For me the advantage of OB would be tje ability to eq or process sounds further for mixing. If you have your basic structure down right, you don’t need to shuffle much stuff around and everything will be ok with the fx track…
And have total control for sculpting the sounds of all separate tracks.
That’s what I would love to use OB, but it bever worked well on my computers
Still not entirely sure how you would record the stuff best.
As said, I would love to use the internal effects, as they are quite good and available at my fingertips. Also things such as compression and distortion are quite a sound shaper I would love to use.
But then I need to really go with separate audio outs and record those separately if I would like, for instance, sidechain tracks in Ableton to the kick track of AR. That would be more „convenient“ (not really) than to mute all tracks but the kick and the FX track in Ableton and AR to record / resample those tracks for the length of the whole song in Ableton with Overbridge.
Is there not an easier way to record your songs into a DAW?
I also use the AR. Many of my basslines are on the AR too. And I use the separate outputs to have at least kick and bass separate in the DAW. All the rest is just stereo out on each box or synth
You could record just the kick separate to the rest of the mix to be able to sidechain everything in your Live set from it. So you’d have two tracks - the Kick and then the full L+R mix including the FX.
You could also use Live to convert a recording to MIDI Drums - Live has an excellent transient detector and will recognise each individual kick so you can delete everything in the resulting MIDI track except the kick and sidechain from it.
You could also use either of Live’s compressors and sidechain to only the kick frequency of the track for a quick and dirty sidechain, though the bass may get in the way unless you record that separately.
