I think the OT will do what you want with relative ease. I find it a very easy machine to work with when I dedicate time to learning/remembering. If there are months between using it, it is easy to forget some things, but this is less of a problem with the Mk2 and it’s additional buttons - fewer obscure combos to remember.
Given the level of intensity you seem likely to apply to the OT, a Mk1 should be just fine. You should be able to sell it for what you paid if you don’t like it or want to have a Mk2 instead.
An interesting comparison. Pollock’s process is fairly transparent - there are videos or maybe just still photos of him dripping paint on canvases. You do need a paint or ink that is fluid enough to flow and drip and splatter, but I can’t recall if he even used brushes or just stir-sticks. RDJ on the other hand is far more opaque and varied. The OT does make it easy to produce material that could be considered IDM, but it can also do Eno-Fripp style looping and plenty of other experimental stuff.
pollock did both, combination of splatter and drizzle. sometimes brushes, sometimes cups/buckets, often paint stir sticks (the flat wooden ones. he was also a bit of a notorious chain smoker so there is a lot of cigarette ash and even burn marks on the majority of his larger paintings (ie most of his paintings).
oh man that guy was the definition of debaucherous. but what separates splatters from genius is perhaps only a few mm of negative space on a canvas apart so lesson to learn here is take your shots even if you’re afraid you might miss.
or at least be intoxicated enough not to care.
" “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take - wayne gretzky” - Michael Scott"
Thanks for the thoughts all. I appreciate it. I’ll likely end up grabbing a mk2 after my project (or maybe sooner and have my wife hide the box from me until I finish said project! There’s some motivation for ya. )
I’ll add a few more things for posterity, maybe these will help anyone else passing through considering the OT.
When I tried the OT the first time:
I didn’t have as much hardware as I do now. I gave it a shot as a solo device and it just didn’t feel good enough as a melodic instrument (go figure) and no poly without wasting tracks. I obviously knew this going in, I just didn’t realize how much it would bother me. I wasn’t in the place to add more boxes to it, so I decided it couldn’t be the “one and only.”
In addition, I’ve owned and sold a good bit of other elektron kit since then (A4, DN, DT, AR) and I kept running into a re-occurring theme. I loved using these standalone as grooveboxes of sorts, but I usually had a lot of trouble integrating them within something I started in DAW.
Basically, if I started something on these, I’d complete it entirely on these. Which was great, but I felt like I was leaving out the hardware instruments I love. OT has the chance to be that main hub of creation that can also integrate my hardware in super some cool or super standard ways depending on my mood.
The OT really opened up for me when I paired it with the TD-3. After that it was a race to see what kind of weirdness I could get when pairing it with my other gear.
I didn’t mention midi much but I’d be stoked to mess with some wacky parameter locking of my Prophet 6.
I’ve done a bit of this in Bitwig, adding LFOs and modulators to a synth that otherwise would not have them.
Something really interesting here is that these can only be mono modulations. I love modulating the Prophet 6 filter by notenumber in bitwig for a psuedo Paraphonic filter behavior. Really cool stuff.
Another thing I’ve done is make a bank of 10 P6 patches that are all individual filter ping drum hits and step sequence through those patches while tweaking some knobs. The settings always revert every patch recall so it can be pretty fun.
I get lost in the weeds with this stuff if I don’t have a quick way to resample the results. Like I’d never expect to re-open patches like this.
I’m definitely going to be building some purpose made templates just for fuckery and sample generation.
E: Maaaaaan. If only that cross fader could midi.
E2: I’m already complaining about features I wish the OT had. With that I can say, I’m ready.
Another would be when somebody asks “if I buy this guitar, can I sound like Eddie Van Halen?” And the answer is “if you can’t play like EVH, then no guitar will get you any closer. That’s why I asked what the OP’s current rig/workflow was. They seem pretty evolved/professional/not-a-noob, but there are tons of people who think the gear is the most important part of the sound.
It’s like Picasso said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
Thanks. I hope I didn’t come off too “it’s not the gear, son” lecturing.
I love my OT. It does what I need it to do and seven years in, I’m still realizing new things I can do with it. But I got into it blind because I just wanted to get into looping again after an aborted attempt with a monome 40h and Max. It’s probably the most consequential instrument I’ve ever owned, excluding my first guitar.
For what it’s worth, I’m also Bitwig based and l’m also on my 2nd OT. When you put the two together, oh man oh man oh man !
That’s what I do these days : I use the OT mainly as a midi sequencer, and what a midi sequencer, to trigger Vsts and then resample the whole thing. It’s fun, great and very inspiring.
So I think if you do this, it will also influence your Bitwig workflow for the better.
And also, the Arranger is just the best hardware song mode ! I’ve tried a bunch of them, the Deluge one, the Pyramid one, the Oxi one one, the Maschine one… The OT’s arranger may be simpler but it’s also fast and intuitive to structure a track. The pattern offset feature is just heaven. None of these others hardware sequencers have it implemented like that.
I’m putting so much thought into it mainly because my scarcest resource lately is time. I’m certain that if I get this, I want to dedicate lots of time to letting it grow on me (without forcing it.)
So I’m trying to take a more measured approach but still be open.
