Aynbody have a Machinedrum?

[eggnchips]

Can anybody emphasize on this 'sterile' subject?
What is sterile about it?

I'm looking for something to be more live and sporadic on as I usally mouse click with odd bits of Midi control.
It's an expenisive buy though if it turns out to be not suited to me.

[simonb]

I've got one, had it for about 2 years now.

The sound is definitely an issue - I'm swithering over whether or not to keep mine now. The sound can be a bit soft and clean for my liking, I like a bit more impact and rawness. Pretty hard to explain. I recently made a thread on the elektron-users forum saying that (in a much more long-winded way) and got a lot of tips and advice - the jist of it seems that you have to experiment a lot with layering, the built in effects, etc if you really want to get it to sound the way you want it to... and also by using more outboard gear, which of course isn't exactly what you want to do after dropping a grand on a drum machine. So either way it's a lot of work, I'll bear with it for a bit longer though. It's one of these bits of kit that's so deep that even if you've used it regularly for well over a year you're probably nowhere near mastering it. Definitely not one for instant sonic gratification though. I get more instant gratification using samples but I'd love to get to the point that I can program the sounds I want to hear from the MD!

The sequencing and interface are great, no complaints there. Using it as a sequencer makes music-making so much more fun and hands-on.

[NoAffiliation]

step one to getting a good sound out of the MD is to take the horribly brutal factory compression settings off the master effects section. this actually means turning the knob so it looks like 100% wet on most instruments (all the way right). md has opposite directional logic with the encoders for some parameters

i have made my best kicks with it and ive made kicks with every hardware and software synth i have including jomox mbase.

try this, load up TRX BD1 + BD2 on separate tracks. lower the gain of bd1 completely. use bd 2 to sculpt the low tone. Im not at my studio right now but pitch will be somewhere left of 12oclock, decay start at 12, lower values for ramp and hold, click should have very little maybe 1-5 max and i usually leave the rest of the distortion parameters on the synth page at zero.

when you are happy with the thump, turn up bd1 into the mix and make a nice click to fill in the transient of the lower drum. once you have the basic sound go onto the second page and filter the drums so they layer nicely. This will give you a super tight and punchy kicks right out of the md. i send my kicks to individual outs but i remember getting good bass drums by tweaking the sidechain compressor a bit on the global effects

good luck!

[djd_oz]

The MD is great, lots of fun. In regards to the sound, it's one of those things either you like it or you don't. It is clean and digital especially if you start using the distortion/filter parameters. Think of glitch/idm sort of sounds.

Layering (I haven't experimented much) and loading samples are ways to make it sound more interesting.

The interface and parameter locks are the things that keeps me going back to the MD for drums.

[AK]

I'm still debating getting one. I wouldn't buy one new, just too damn expensive I reckon. I was in Digital Village in Brum the other week and they have one in there, played with it for about an hr or so but I wasn't prepared to part with £1299 for it.

[NoAffiliation]

another feature that's quite important is how the swing can be added to or subtracted to any step in a pattern. by default you get standard swing but you could for instance just erase all the swings and put them only on the 2 and 4 beats of each bar giving you a much different groove than just swing for hi-hats

[Audio Dependent]

I have one. love it! not 100% sure I agree on the sterile sound - yeah sure when you first load it up and play a preset patch with the compression on it sounds very thin and quite ugly. but once you learn how the different synth engines work and start using the built in eq, filters, LFOs and effects you can get lots of warm and complex results. I'd really like to expand mine with a +drive as I think this really opens it up to endless possibilities. the sequencer and internal sampling is a lot of fun too.

[eggnchips]

Think I'll get one.