I know I’m not the first to wish for this, but damn, I’d give my pinky toe for some microtiming on my machinedrum. Maybe both pinky toes.
I know there are tricks to achieve some similar effect but I’m usually too lazy.
That said, I’ve had this machine for 5+ years and it still puts a smile in my ears every time. Doing some A4+MD routing mischief that’s hitting the spot. If I could just scoot that tom a hair.
could you point to those tricks?
-UW machinedrum? then installing up samples with silence at start. (&/or end)
Creative use of swing on specific trigs/tracks
Using machine (E12 or ROM) with retriggers at odd settings, then LFO-VOL/PLOCKS etc to mute the excess
External sequencing
Nothing compares to the nudge trig for ease but its possible with planning.
Damn, afraid someone would ask that. 
Well there’s apparently a way to do it with an inverted square wave applied to the volume of a track (described somewhere in the old elektron-users forum) that either I didn’t understand or wasn’t too satisfied with the result.
Another way (if you have the MDUW and can settle for a 12 bit sample) is to set up a ram record and a ram play machine. On another track set up the sound you want to scoot around, let’s say a snare. On the ram record machine set the length low, like 12 or something. With the MD NOT in any recording mode, manually trigger the ram record. Wait, literally a second and hit the snare. Now hit the ram play. You should hear the snare sound a second or so after you hit the button. Now, with the rest of your pattern playing, and your sampled snare triggered within the pattern, you can turn the “start” knob to control when the snare sounds. Whew. See what I mean about feeling too lazy? If you save the RAM to a ROM machine you can call it up easily for next time.
If you want to go another step further and have a bit more flexibility and not be tied to to the 12 bits (my ear can hardly tell the difference though), then follow all of the previous steps, get out a mono eigth inch cable, get another beer, and go to the global menu. Plug one end of your cable to the ‘c’ output and the other end into ‘input a’. Under ‘routing’ go to ‘output’ and find the track your recorded ram snare is on. Route it to output ‘c’. Go back to the main routing page and under ‘trig in a’, make the destination track wherever your actual snare, tom, or whatever you want to microtime is. For example, if your actual snare is on track 3 then track 3 should be your ‘DEST’. Turn the sensitivity up and volume to max. Now when you hit the recorded RAM play machine (with your snare sample) it will trigger your destination track. To adjust the microtiming turn the ‘start’ knob to the desired spot and plock if you want. All of your triggering will happen from the RAM machine. All of your sound tweeking will happen on the destination track (snare?). Make sure the volume on the RAM play machine is turned up so your destination track can “hear” it.
Or, get an octatrack and sample all of your MD sounds. Or get a rytm. Or offer elektron a pinky toe for an OS update that I think will never happen because it’s a hardware issue. Or embrace the limitations of the machine and just make music.
It’s a pain in the ass sometimes but this is why I love elektron. The instruments are so deep there always seems to be a way to find a means of making something happen. Fun to explore.
Ha, Ozone replied while I was writing. Yeah, all those things too
I don’t know if my MD has a bug or OS 1.62 isn’t up to date enough, but my machine won’t do different ‘swing’ for different tracks. If swing is on it’s on everything and at the same value. As in, i can’t get just a snare track to have swing. I hardly bother with it because of that. Anyone else have this issue?
Every track has the same swing amount but you have to manually place your swing trigs if you want different tracks to swing on different steps or manually clear swing trigs for tracks you don’t want swingin
Hey Lofi, the resampling technique I never tried before, good to have options.
… & yeah, Housecliche explained the Swing thing well. Overall swing amount is global, but each track you can select which trigs will be affected.
Can get things wonky. Nice layering a couple of snare or clap tracks & then hunting for flams. Now if only the swing amount could be modulated…
So weird that I never put that together about the swing. On other machines I’ve owned you have to initiate the places you want movement as opposed to pulling triggers off. I feel a little boneheaded
a few other tricks:
play at twice the actual bpm.
increase the resolution to 2x instead of the default 1x.
…these two things alone will get you four times the normal resolution.
rhythmic lfo’s can be your friends.
oddtime delay settings can be too, if your echo isn’t in use already.
if all else fails, play the phrase you want by hand into a ram machine set to sample an entire measure. let the phrase loop together with sequenced notes.
Good point about the resolution Dubathonic. Only drawback to that would be all the patterns you’re jamming with need to work in that resolution. Workable though.
To Ozone, it’s not so much a resampling thing as it is using the the “start” perameter from a ram machine as your means of acheiving timing manipulation, and route the sound back into the MD to trigger the track who’s sound you actually want. The advantage to this is you can tweek the perameters of the actual machine you want to use as opposed to a sample. I’m not doing a great job of describing the set up, sorry.
A microtiming retro-fit would be awesome, but yeah, the tricks cited here are pretty good.
My dream is to add “direct jump” pattern-switching to the MD (and Monomachine.) That feature is such a boon to creativity and performance! One of my favorite things about the A4’s sequencing system.
+1 