My live setup currently consists of an Octatrack (which is the master) + A4, while my drummer just recently got a MachineDrum.
We do electronic pop, so I tend to use song mode on the Octatrack.
I’m really interested in chaining all our songs together, using resampling to do DJ-like transitions between songs in the set. However, I don’t have a good solution for the Machinedrum on this one - either my drummer will need to forgo song mode on the MD and change patterns by hand, or I’ll need to find a different solution.
I wish every Elektron machine had the OT’s ability to chain songs… is there a workaround anyone can think of to accomplish something like that on the MD?
by chaining songs on the OT, do you mean the pattern arranger?
I don’t know if this would help you, but when you change a pattern on the OT, will the MD follow the pattern changes?
Let’s say you are playing pattern A01 on the OT and you then select pattern A02. When the OT switches over to pattern A02, the MD will play MD pattern 2.
If the above is possible, I would imagine that having the OT set to play patterns in arrangement mode, the MD would follow along.
Yes exactly - I use song / arranger mode on the OT. There’s no equivalent on the MD so I was hoping there was a creative way to do this without relying on manual pattern switching, although that’s not the end of the world either. Was hoping I was missing some obvious way to do this.
the machinedrum has song mode too? both the octatrack and machine drum transmit midi song pointer info.
or you can also set the machinedrum up to “mirror” the octatrack in terms of switching patterns.
my favorite mode is map edit, under global, via MIDI notes you can play tracks, patterns or control the transport. there are some interesting modes with the patterns, like queue, where you can chain the patterns up and also instant. because the kits are linked to patterns you can do cool stuff by switching patterns to trigger different track sounds.
i hope elektron adds MIDI machines to the octatrack for seamless integration someday, it works well now, it’s just that can be hard to remember what corresponds to what.
The Machinedrum does have song mode, so you can program it like that if you wish. I do this all day long with the Mono as master.
I believe you can also set it to receive program change, so that when you change a pattern on the OT, it will change the corresponding pattern on the MD.
Thanks guys! The pattern switch idea is probably the best one (though not necessarily ideal, since then his patterns need to match perfectly with mine).
MD does have song mode, but only the OT has the ability to chain songs together into a continuous set (without stopping).
Since there’s no way to send a midi start in the middle of a song, if his song ends and mine doesn’t, stopping and restarting is the only way I know of to get things going again.
Maybe I can put a repeater on the OT fader and use that to transition, or something like what Laughing Animal suggested. As I suspected though there doesn’t seem to be a straightfoward way to accomplish this.
If you have an extra midi track on the OT, you can program the pattern switches for the MD with trigs on an OT midi track. Just map the notes to patterns in the MD setup menu.