Going analog

[blizt]

I bought an Electribe ER some weeks ago and you can get very fast all these little sounds Melchior like to spice up in his tracks. It really has a trademark sound you can recognise I'll say.

[hoag'sobject]

i have both EA-1 and ER-1.. they are great machines...

for myself i use ableton to spew my midi seq into it that way i can easily do more stuff than the sequencer of the electribe...

[Hades]

My girlfriend has just ordered me my first piece of analog hardware for christmas - a Korg Electribe ER-1.

.

Does your girlfriend realise she's just opened a gateway to a long and possibly very expensive adventure,
that might make you forget all about her.
You'll prefer turning other knobs from now on...

have fun with it.
I never had one myself, but I had one in the studio a year ago, and they're great little machines.

Just a small piece of advice : if you want a more intuitive and hands-on feeling to making your music,
you might want to consider Ableton Live instead of Logic.
I'm not saying Logic ain't good, just that Live might work faster, easier and more intuitive,
just like working with something like an electribe will work a lot faster than creating beats with a mouse.
I used to try to make music with Cubase, it took me ages.
But I've been flying around in Live for ages now. It's such a breeze to work with...

[Harry]

Thanks for all the advice guys, it's a big help! I'm not sure if my girlfriend does actually know what she's got herself in for, it's probably best to keep this way until the package arrives!

get your self some nice cables with the least signal to noise ratio you can. The electribes are super noisy. Which is nice from time to time but can get a little nippy.

Any advice or pointers on which are the nice cables to buy man?

Just a small piece of advice : if you want a more intuitive and hands-on feeling to making your music,
you might want to consider Ableton Live instead of Logic.

I had thought of this before, after seeing how fast some of my friends work on abelton. But i've spent the past 3 years getting friendly with logic and am now starting to get tracks out of it that i'm really happy with. Maybe in a year a two, i'll start looking into ableton too

[Wondermachine]

I had thought of this before, after seeing how fast some of my friends work on abelton. But i've spent the past 3 years getting friendly with logic and am now starting to get tracks out of it that i'm really happy with. Maybe in a year a two, i'll start looking into ableton too

that's actually good...
depending on how you use ableton live, the resulting sound quality CAN suck,
but ableton live offers an unique worklow, you can develop ideas MUCH faster than on any other DAW
so get the best of both worlds, and rewire ableton live to logic.
start with the cheapest version of ableton live (intro) or even with a demo to see if its something for you

consider that you have a new piece of hardware (electribe) , so i would suggest concentrating on this one
don't get lost

[lem]

I changed to from Cubase SX3 to Logic then to Ableton Live.

I got Ableton for performance, and I was happy with Logic. But then migrating stuff from logic to Ableton and vise-versa turned into a nightmare. I'm super happy with Ableton atm, I have really dug into Max/Msp. Moreso than I ever thought at first.

One thing to consider is that I have lost about 4 years out of 10 just learning how to use different DAW's. If I had stuck with Cubase I would probably be Richie Hawtin by now and be selling my own brand of organic toothpaste... (ok, if I put it like that, maybe its best I switched)
But the point im trying to make is that its better to learn your software through and through, THEN its really transparent in the creative process. Being quicker with Ableton live is a load of rubbish really. If you get to learn logic really really well, you will be quicker than someone else will be with Ableton. When I first started engineering there was an old lecturer that could make edits in 1/4 tape quicker than most people could do a cut in a audio editor. It's only experience that limits you.

One thing I miss with logic was the ability to map your own keyboard shortcuts. Learn what these are capable of and you could beat somebody in a (pointless) race against ableton.

There isn't much to learn on the Electribe, it has a very limited set of tools. But as with the TR909, when I had it, those limits taught me so much about music.

[Phase Ghost]

But the point im trying to make is that its better to learn your software through and through, THEN its really transparent in the creative process.

That's a good point. I considered Live before I got on board with Numerology (shut up Lem ), but found that although it was quicker to get ideas down, it really wasn't that different. I'd probably miss the mixing and built in Logic plugins more than anything. You can rewire Live into Logic if you wanted to.

Anyways, back on topic. Have fun with the ER-1, I've got the iPad version and always liked the sounds of those machines. I'd actually like to see them ditch the EMX and ESX and go back to the smaller ones.

[Hades]

Being quicker with Ableton live is a load of rubbish really.

does Logic have a clip view ?
If it has, then I can understand what you mean, otherwise I can't agree with this.

don't get me wrong lem, you make a very valid point that learning a piece of software will make you the fastest, whatever the program is you choose.
But I tend to believe your learning curve will be a lot smaller and faster with Live, and because it has its wonderful clip view,
I feel it's a lot closer to making music with hardware on a very intuitive level.

Plus I think it takes a lot longer for someone to learn how to make tracks than it does to get fluent with a software program. So maybe those 4 years you "lost" were also a bit of the famous few years at the start that make it seem so hard to get good at this. I mean I can't imagine you didn't learn anything just because you switched DAW's later on.

Anyways, there's so many ways to do this, this is a bit of a pointless discussion.
One should just find whatever works for you, and stick to it and build some experience.