u/ForcesOfOdin

Digibounce

The song started with a simple idea, what if gave instruments alternating delay to create a call and response groove. It was also a chance for me to play with energy dynamics a bit. Risers, drop outs, volume plays.

I noticed that dirtywave m8 has the tendency to sound very different on good headphones or good speakers, which just means when you record the final song you gotta play with the levels a lot. I should probably export stems and fine tune that way instead of recording into ableton over audio cable.

I find sound design on this thing to be so intuitive, the way you can quickly test out new filter settings, see a little dot on the LFOs and envelopes, tweak old instruments. It's amazing like that. Also, deep copy of patterns is soo good (SHIFT+OPTION to highlight, then SHIFT+EDITx2 (gotta press edit twice fast)).

I didn't play much with tables on this one except the hats, I used a 00 table with loop back at different points to get a little more variety without explicit programming but you can go a lot further than that.

I also used the transpose feature a lot to breathe a little life into old chains without reprogramming the individual notes. This is also how i got my risers.

Last thing I can note is that I "finished" this song yesterday, and this morning on the train I did another pass and just added a bit of special sauce here and there, and a little variety, did not do any major demolition, but it took the song up a notch for sure.

I did debate over whether the groove gets too overused but I didn't think spamming variation would help too much and it's a decent groove. It's either a bit hypnotizing or annoying depending on taste.

Thanks all, hope my notes may help other beginners like me to producing and the wonderful dirtywave M8.

I got into music production about 2 months ago with the purchase of a korg kronos. I was so fascinated by elektron work flow that I decided to pick up a model cycles to see if I liked the work flow. It didn't get enough play, slowly picking away at twisting knobs and parameter locking. Then last weekend it clicked hard. I was setting fills, i was setting a/b paths with [50%][pre-bar][pre][pre-bar][pre] patterns. And it was like wow, these 16 steps alone can really BREATHE. I can only imagine with non uniform track lengths and using more pages.

Within that day i produced this song: Cycles Fminor Apr 25

It's basic but kind of fun, I doubled up the bass where it felt slow in ableton, and also doubled up the kick in parts but this all cycles, partly sequencing my Kronos for two of the tracks.

Yesterday I discovered the drums on the cycles sound amazing with the effects from my sp404mk2,and that got me my second song from this device: Cycles Fminor 2 May 3

Notes on the second one, I arranged 6 patterns on cycles, did a live talk walking through them and using delay some track mutes and fills, then did a resample of that using hyper res effect on sp404mk2, then automated the volume on the second take and reverb on the first. But again mostly cycles driven.

My takeaway is that it's a bit tricky to make songs this way if you want to think linearly like a daw but you can absolutely do it with a little help from external tools. Also it has made me really want a flagship elektron box like a digitak or syntakt. The sounds you guys get are so amazing.

Anyway, I hope this post gave some other noobies like me some ideas. Thanks for reading and glad to be a member of your community.

I started learning piano in December, then a couple months ago balled out on a Korg Kronos... and yeah the obsession to make music has just grown and grown. I grabbed the M8 to be on the go music making tool, and also to act as a powerful sequencer for my kronos.

Thanks to this community and youtube i picked up a few tricks and was able to finish my first track fully on M8, i did just a tiny bit of compressor work and EQ on the sp404 mk2.

I'm loving this device. I've picked up side chaining, table arps, deep copies, filters, sample play back, some of the synth engines a little, some of the LFO stuff. Programmed my first kick and clap. Man, you can really FLY on this device. It's such a solid work flow. What cool tricks should I learn next?

So happy to be a part of this amazing community.