Elektron Musical Instruments

Spoke to Daniel Elektron at the Sounds-Expo.

The Ultra Wave is available as a hardware upgrade for the MachineDrum as well as 
being sold as new Unit/product. You will have to send your MachineDrum to Elektron 
though. He didn't say how much the upgrade would cost, but i'm sure it will a lot less than 
a new unit.

Here is the low down!  

Exactly the same as the MachineDrum but with 2 new machines.
Rom Record and Rom Play.
Boots up same as the MachineDrum then has extra Rom loading screen.
Up to 32 Samples can be stored.
You can have 16 Rom Play machines at once each playing any one of your 32 loaded 
samples.
Sample time is approx 20 secs. Which I understand can be increased if you choose a 
different sample rate.

The Rom Machine controls are (from memory). 
Pitch, 
Retrig, 
RTime,
Rate, (sample resolution. Just on the record machine, i think)
Hold (ie Decay), 
Start and End (To play sample in reverse put start to '127' and end to '0'. Some interesting 
LFO modulation possibilties here!).
There is no "real-time" time-stretch function.

You can record on the fly, while other Machines are playing.
You set record in and out points as you would trig points. 
For example If you are recording a live from a sound source the Record Machine will keep 
recording from the until you are happy. Then I presume it switches to a play machine 
when you have finished recording. An Elektron Demo guy was doing this with a loop from 
a record deck and it appeared to happen seemlessly. 

Daniel mentioned something about offereing a fast USB Midi adaptor to speed up sample 
transfers times when you buy the machine. Import via midi for a 4 bar loop did seemed 
painfully slow.

Oh and I almost forgot. It sounded great. 

David