Elektron Musical Instruments

On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 12:36:22PM -0700, Jason Vernon Starnes wrote:
>    yes, this sounds like an interesting feature the MD could 'learn' from
>    Mono.
>    Not  having  Mono  (yet),  I  can't  quite picture how this works, but
>    perhaps if we had a name
>    for  it  we could add to MD wishlist.  Anyone care to further describe
>    this or other
>    features that the rest of us are missing out on? :)

well, since I brought it up I'll expand on this one...

the beat-box is setup similar to the drum implementation you would
find on a synthesizer. that is, the controls are shared for all of the
drums. to play a bass drum, you press C, snare drum is C#, etc. so when
you want to program in grid mode, you press the trig position and the
key of the drum you want.

now, on many synths, it's a major drawback (to me) that the controls are
shared for all drums. but since the sequencer has parameter locks, you
can easily change the pitch to low for the bass drums, medium for the
snare and high for the hi-hats (for example). as well as lock envelope
and filter settings, etc. so it's pretty flexible for being so simple
(though it is more tedious to program and a lot less flexible than the MD).

the synthesis controls are simple and they're similar to the E12
machines on the MD. there parameters are pitch, start, RTRG and RTIM.
and since the controls are shared, you can turn up the RTRG/RTIM
parameters and have it effect all of the drum sounds. make sense?

the bad part: the sequencer is monophonic (at present, I really hope
this is extended). what that means is that any trig position can only
trigger one drum sound (note) at a time. so you can't have a steady
hi-hat beat going while you layer drums overtop of it, for exmaple. your
hi-hats can only sound when nothing else is sounding. but you can mess
with parameter locks and the track's dedicated delay to give the
impression that they're playing steadily.

hope that helps.... I'm sick of typing :-)

Joe