Elektron Musical Instruments

Sorry about the tone, I tried to make the sarcasm obvious with the PS
line. What I wanted to say was that the Machinedrum was designed as a
Percussion sequencer, bottom up. That means the gains and drawbacks
with the grid base. The Machinedrum and Monomachine of today does not
like to record non-quantised, the MPC is the oposite. 

The MIDI machines where added as a fun bonus, that we also enjoy
using. But stretching them to that "normal" sequencer some people want
them to be will never happen.

There is a limit to how far we can stretch the basic concept towards a
"real sequencer" aka "normal" sequencer. It is possible it would be
possible to do some hack to lock note pitch in real time recording
mode, but you could never get the note length. And it would be a hack,
and the nature of hack are such as they could cause 100 side effects
taking us into a long debugging phase. 

Personally I don't find it so useful it would be worth the 2-6 weeks
of development. I might even looking deeper into the concept find it
cumbersome and ugly from a users view if taking into account possible
channel overlap etc. Maybe it could be solved with "record only the
track in focus" or similar.

Anyway, I don't want to discuss specific features in general. We enjoy
getting suggestions from all users. Some we find excellent, some we
find not really fittign into the concept and others impossible or too
hard to implement into the existing environment.

---

There was another discussion going on about if we're making huge
profits or not, taking into account the price of our products. (By the
way, remember that our prices are "real" prices, all taxes and
shipping payed for US and Europe.) Rest assured that we get lower
salaries than most friends with similar education. Being Swedish most
money goes to taxes anyway. :)

But we have European production (like Clavia and Access). That means
high prices. We know the profits the big fishes has on their low cost
products, and we are much lower. For example, I use to say the
Monomachine keyboard probably is one of the most expensive keyboard
produced today. Even though it is the product we sell with the highest
price it's the one with the lowest margin (in %).

...and the upgrades are mostly a service for existing SPS-1 owners.
Since all the CPU board with the dual DSP system and full memory
system is exchanged, and it takes so much time to dig down to the
lowest level where this board is it's mainly a no-profit service that
we will keep for a while so noone feel left behind, wanting the new
features, but not wanting to pay the full UW price for a new unit. If
you want it - get it _now_ we have less than 30 coming in, and with
the US service situation we don't know if we probably will now produce
more after that.

Alot of text, but basicly, please leave up to us to decide what is
possible/feasible to implement, and keep the wishlists coming. We
never ignore them, we just keep our right to decide what are best for
our products and the future of the company.

...and never buy any of our stuff based on what you _wish_ they could
do, look at _what_ they do, then decide if you think they are worth
the price or not!

Thanks for reading all through!

Daniel, Elektron

--- In elektron-users@yahoogroups.com, "Rui Peixoto" <rupix@h...> wrote:

> I wasn't trying to create a flame war here. Nor being offensive in
the first 
> place. If I had some hostility in those lines it was against
Daniel's tone 
> that, while being hard to admit it, pissed me off a bit.