I mean hardwarewise is bit outdated. Processing power of the unit is rather modest by today’s standards. Having more processing power can provide better filters, effects, timestrething with less artifacts. It’s because you can use oversampling for calculations. Also realtime pitch-shifter may be handy. It would be nice to have one or even two input pairs more, but we are not living in the perfect world.
Hevertheless I’m sold on that. I’m going through the manual and (at least on paper) it seems to have a lot of sense and flexibility. Can’t wait to put my trembling hands on it!
IMHO it is like adding strings to a guitar. The guitar is outdated: strings wood form factor and posture of the instrument could certainly be optimized but in the end you work also with limitations. See the great amount of people who can’t produce because of excessive GAS.
With features I kind of agree, with processing power not that much. Better filters/effects are rather like better materials for the same old concept of a guitar.
Yep I agree that GAS is a monster, but I’m quite sucessful in taming mine, yet it exists. I buy not more than one synth a year including also very small ones like 303 clones or so. When I think about normal ones it’s rather one in 1.5-2 years and I regard it reasonable compromise.
Regarding limitations I don’t really get why A4, AK, AR, DN and DT have so few effects. Now DSPs are not that expensive and really extensive effects department could elevate these machines even higher. Obviously the ones present there are really good. OT has more, but bit worse. Therefore it would be nice if it had more input pairs to apply efects separately to various synths. But yep I know. Limitations are true catalyzer of creativity, not the synths that do everything, but when you sit with them, you produce nothing.
There is also one thing I miss badly in all the Elektron machines. For several years I’ve been using Korg EMX and ESX. Cool and straightforward machines, very fun to use, but at least class lower in sound features and the price. Yet they had small ribbon controller and slider, this was to control their arpeggiators. They were also quite limited, for example they triggered every 1/16th depsite the length of the note. But you could set different scale (selection of approx. 20) and they were extremely powerful (when used right) for creating interesting riffs, melodies and crazy arps at hand. It was speeding up cretive process vastly. I really miss these little bastards. I still have them and maybe try to transmit MIDI from EMX to my AK, but area on my music desk just reached its limits.
My desk is not that big and unfortunately I tend to put there also other random things, like books, phones etc. So it fills up anyway. I regard this as a perfect size, but anyway half of it’s surface is occupied by AK. So there is moderate GAS, but not that severe.
That’s funny: people praise vintage samplers for how they color the sound, which often is a byproduct of their low bitrate / samplerate or technical limitations… Yet, OT is often criticized for being “old” and for having effects that color the sound too much.
OT is not old enough! To be a vintage classic.
Anyway, if you like the sound you get with a piece of gear, it’s the most important.
I don’t see the point moaning without trying…
Btw the resolution is usually counted in pulses per quarter note (PPQN), and OT is 96 PPQN (24 per step). I’d prefer 1/24 microtiming values, like newer Elektrons.
In a default pattern which runs at 1x each trig is 1/16th.
A pattern with 2x scale runs double the speed and each trig is 1/32nd.
Page 77 of the manual states “Setting the tempo to 2x in the SCALE SETUP menu will double the resolution of the micro timing grid.”
The screen indicates 1/384 on the smallest offset when in the MICRO TIMING menu regardless if the pattern scale is 1x or 2x. This is why I’m asking. I interpret the manual to mean that the double resolution transforms 1/384 to 1/768. The MICRO TIMING menu does not indicate this though.
In the MICRO TIMING menu the smallest adjustment is displayed as 1/384. Page 77 of the manual indicates that setting the tempo to 2x in SCALE SETUP doubles the resolution of the micro timing grid. If that’s what happens then that first 1/384 nudge should turn into 1/768 at double the speed.
1/384th of a step. ( edit: per page not per step ) Regardless of how fast the sequencer is moving.
Increasing the resolution would mean more steps and microsteps are available. This is not the case. This is not how octatrack works. You can increase the rate of a sequencer lane. At 2x, the lane is running twice as fast as the master sequencer. The microtiming resolution is still 1/384th of a step (edit: per page, not per step)
The manual wording made me question it since it says “Setting the tempo to 2x in the SCALE SETUP menu will double the resolution of the micro timing grid.”
2x doubles the speed which in effect means that a 16th note plays at the speed and duration of a 32nd note - but there are still only 16 steps per page.
So with microtiming there are 384 ticks per page, regardless of what multiplier used, so the resolution does not change in terms of number of steps, but in speed e.g 2x is double speed, not double number of ticks.
