Yeah, I tend to agree. Loopop is great at breaking down features, but his musical demonstrations leave quite a bit to be desired. In this case, his virtues were a vice: he ended up making an already clunky UI look even more clunky, and totally failed to demonstrate how it makes cool music (those sequences made me grind my teeth).
I totally get that some folks with eurorack will appreciate this. At the same time, the Pyramid blows this away, and the MKIII has expanded cv options, right? I’m all for products that open music making up to as many people as possible, but at this point I’m not interested in saving a few bucks and sacrificing a ton of features. This seems like a total disappointment from Korg–a real failure of imagination. But maybe one of the less technical and more “musical” reviewers will do it justice…
Tbh the elektron sequencer does not lack much imho.
To me, missing feature are :
Correct visualisation of, polyrythm, polymeters.
Always a pain to program these on several pages where each one has a different part of the main loop.
Instant pattern changes : stop these stupid 2 steps pattern change wait, once and for all !.
Let the user decide if the result is acceptable or not…( C’mon Machinedrum, and A4 are able do to this for years !..)
Free tracks like on the ot ! Decoupled from “stop” please.
Fill function midi mapable.
Plocks of arp settings. Octatrack someone ? cough…
Slides ! cough
On the nice but not mandatory I woul like :
Modulation of start-end step.
Inter track modulations developped more.
A way to have multiple conditionals on the same step.
Sequence direction
Sequence mutation ( switch two steps, transpose etc…)
Counters trc
Most of it is already implemented and I’m still flabergasted ( yeah, as a non english speaker, I luv’ this word ) that all the features are spreaded across the whole range of product and not a single one has it all…
I have a Beatstep Pro…but this thing has a 3rd track for melodic sequencing plus loads of other nifty features. Hopefully updates might add cool stuff to the Mod output( EG type shapes etc, LFOs )… if it’s really going to be around £270 in the UK then I’m in. Nice job, Korg
(I’ll be keeping the BSP anyway…& the SQ-1 …different inspirations…)
I can definitely see the appeal in this thing but I don’t think it offers enough that is different enough from my Squid. The one thing where it falls down for me, if I’m understanding it right, is that the sequencer playback direction/speed works at the track level which makes it less useful for drums. If each individual drum could be defined individually then it would be really powerful, for example by maintaining the pulse of the kick/snare and then have hats, claps, toms being less predictable.
The new Keystep 37 have this function too, called Walk in the arpeggiator pattern. Funny but not very usable except for some experimental things I think.
I don’t trust Korg’s ability to create a competent sequencer. They never fixed the issue with the Electribe 2 that caused transitions between switching patterns to mess up FX and cut off samples.
They never implemented a way to chain patterns on the Minilogue, Monilogue, or Minilogue XD. After over 7 years, the Volca range can only store 16 1-bar patterns max. Korg has shown that they don’t care about the functionality of the sequencer in most of the products they’ve produced in the last decade.
Hmmm I’m slightly wondering the same thing. Like, have I missed the demo including a pattern change?!
I’d also have second thoughts if it doesn’t have page autocopy, or whatever the MPC equivalent is called eg. working on 16 steps, then lengthening track to 64 and getting 4 copies of what you just made - that
In defence of Korg the pattern change and basic song mode on the volca sample works pretty well. It would seem a bit humble inside this box but better than nothing.
I also want to know what you really end up with when you live record, with overlapping notes etc. Loopop covered it a tiny bit with the chord, but do the notes all end together, do the subsequent trig buttons light up to show your notes going beyond one step, what about quantising…
Copying and pasting a step with all parameters too… ? Need more demos
I just watched Loopop video, I don’t think I am really into the way the step LEDs show info, it looks hard to read to me with the odd thin line LED indicators.
Might look better in person, but straight away that jumped out to me as something that would irritate me.
