Thanks for watching, @musosolus and @phading!
For me, the upgrade from the mk1 to the mk2 was like night and day in terms of comfort. The TL;DR of it is that the mk2 has better buttons, better encoders and a better screen. The long answer is this:
Screen: the mk1 screen is small, the icons are small, the viewing angle is narrow, and it’s sluggish. When I hit play, the number showing where the playhead is in the sequence just looks like an 8 because the pixels are so slow to change colors. Because the icons and text are small and there’s no graphical representation of the envelopes or filters like on the mk2, it’s hard to immediately see what page I’m on.
Encoders: mk1 encoders are slow. You can be more precise with them, sure, but I find myself pressing and turning all the time to make it change values in bigger increments. All the elektron knobs take a bit of force to press, and it’s annoying to have to do it all the time. it’s either that (and then not-press turning for precision) or doing 2-3 full turns just to get to the value I want. The mk2 knobs are as fast as on the DT and DN and OT mk2, so it’s a lot more comfortable to use IME.
Buttons: mk1’s buttons are a bit hard to read because they have a red LED over the button instead of backlit RGB buttons. The difference between a trig and a lock trig is that they’re fully lit and half lit respectively, and the half lit ones can be hard to see if I have a lamp aimed directly at the A4. I also prefer the feel of the soft square buttons that actuate with little force more than the round hard plastic buttons of the mk1.
More controls: On the mk1, going into the settings menu is a two handed button combo. FUNC all the way to the left + GLOBAL all the way to the right. There’s no shortcut for saving a project, so it’s FUNC+GLOBAL -> YES > YES > YES > YES to save, then NO -> NO to go out of the menu. That is assuming you’ve already saved once and that it remembers the last cursor position. On the mk2 you only need one hand, and it’s FUNC+SETTINGS -> YES ->YES, and it returns to the screen you were on before saving automatically. Also, having a little cluster of buttons for kit, pattern, mix, etc between the FUNC and arrow buttons makes saving kits and patterns more comfortable than on the mk1. Also being able to change octaves while browsing through sounds is very handy; arrow buttons to navigate the list, oct+ and oct- to change the octaves.
The main difference when it comes to sound is that the mk2 has a new overdrive which I think is easier to use. It behaves more like how I’d expect an overdrive to behave. The mk1 sounds great, but it’s rather unique and hard to predict because it sort of “smudges” and softens the sound while also overdriving it. I also think there’s a tiny bit more bass on the mk2. Just enough that patches from scratch sound a bit more even than on the mk1, not a huge difference.
@phading Setting up performance macros is definitely a huge time sink. It’s the main reason most of my A4 tracks don’t have a B-section: all my music-making-energy is used up by the time I’ve made a set of performance macros I’m happy with. Most of my DT and DN tracks have B-sections because all my modulations are done on the fly instead of carefully configured beforehand. Using the performance macros also add another layer of complexity in that all the sounds I make are “low energy” sounds, so I can later ramp them up with the performance macros. Because of this, I’ve only saved a few sounds that are loud/high energy from the get-go, because then I’ll have no more space to ramp up the sounds with performance macros!
