Solo MnM artists - share your general production habits here

Elektron Gear Monomachine
#1

We all know the MnM is quite flexible…

I didn’t make much use of song mode, for instance… but that was in the past. :slight_smile: I am very much into raw techno sounds and currently working on my first project - just discovered how nicely polished the final result could be - many transitions that are almost impossible to be done if working on a single pattern or chaining patterns manually. The level of pattern automatisation in song mode is incredible!

I follow some strict rules when it comes to production:

  1. Listen to some inspiring music (very often not necessarily related to my own style);

  2. Designing drum sounds first;

  3. Shaping melodic sounds and elements I would call “my unique bits”;

  4. Going back to drum design;

  5. Creating as many patterns as I could if not too exhausted and switching regularly between them, learning how they would hypothetically develop; devoting much time listening to them;

  6. SysEx backup is always needed but sometimes a notebook and a pencil are much handier if I decide to log something important either sonically or structurally.

My questions:

What are your golden MnM rules of creativity?
Are you able to imagine your music and then recreate it straightaway onto the instrument?

#2

I’m not a soloist, but I’ve learned a lot from downloading Lem’s samplepack from last year. He often takes clever advantage of the MnM’s strengths and has a lot to teach about MnM percussion programming.

More generally, try this thread as well. I’ll second VennDiagram’s advice to learn routing and harnessing the internal effects … I spent a lot of time on those topics and getting comfortable with them has freed me up to focus on actual music making without getting sidetracked during setup.

Lastly, if you haven’t spent time at the old forum, I recommend reading threads dedicated to the MnM there. Lots of users who are not active on e0 left a lot of great advice there in years past that is still very useful for sound design and workflow.