Elektron Musical Instruments

On Jun 11, 2004, at 4:58 AM, andyklug wrote:

> I'm thinking about getting a machinedrum for myself.  My primary
>  concern is about how easy or difficult it is to save and recall
>  projects (songs, patterns and kits) at the drop of a hat.

songs, patterns and kits are somewhat separate entities, but they
can be linked together as well. if you're in extended mode (and
most people are 99% of the time), then a pattern has a kit
associated with it. if you've created a song, then you've
constructed it out of patterns (which have kits associated with
them). so if yo load a song and press play, it will play your
song with the appropriate patterns and kits - you don't have
to load these separately once you've loaded the song. so
there's no fuss, really.

there is one large caveat, however: if you do a sysex dump
of a song/pattern/kit and then plan on reloading and playing
it later, you may have some work to do before you can play it.
for example, suppose that prior to the sysex dump your
patterns resided in locations A01 through A08. so you
programmed a song based on those pattern locations. then
you did a sysex dump of the song, patterns and the kit(s)
used.  you then erased patterns A01 through A08 and
wrote a new song there.  now when you do a sysex dump
of the old song *back* to the MD, you can choose which
location to move the kit, patterns and song to.  so now
suppose you move the patterns to C04 through C11.  when
you load the song, it will try to play the patterns in locations
A01 through A08, instead of C04 through C11.  so you now
have to either erase what's in A01-A08 and copy your
C04-C11 patterns there or you have to edit the song and
change the pattern numbers (which can be time consuming
if your song is complicated).

needless to say, this can be a tedious situation if you have
to deal with this problem a lot.  if you seldom dump the
memory of your MD (or you dump and reload the entire
memory at once) then you won't run into this problem.  or
you may just have to deal with it on rare occasions, like
when your pattern memory's full.

that said, you should keep in mind that while this may
detract from the "quick on its feet" aspect of the MD, the very
nature of the MD when writing songs more than makes up
for this.  you can work *very* quickly with its interface to
create and sequence excellent sounds - quickly enough
that I've improvised with it and live musicians and had no
problem keeping up. and while software (and particularly
"all in one" software studios like Reason, which you are
used to) may be able to recall all of your settings at the
click of a virtual button, their manner of working
is not nearly as enjoyable or inspiring as the MD's is (or
the Monomachine for that matter).

I hope that this ridiculously long email answers your
questions :-)
Joe

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