Think outside the box?hydrogen wrote:After spending some time just messing with it... i find that i only use it for the highhats and some snares. and maybe a couple toms... i'm really thinking about moving to a vermona drm1.
i've used it for bass stuff but when i start mixing those with the analogues it gets cloudy so i stopped doing that. I think if i were making strictly minimal i'd rethink how i was leveraging the lowend because you can make some extremely bouncy stuff with it.
Try writing a standard kick/hat, and a bass/few chords/whatever and leave the slate/background, empty. Then fill in the silence with interesting and evolving 'backdrops/percussion' etc with the MD.
I find you can give atomosphere and life to an otherwise standard idea. Dead silence behind a kick/bass/percussion pattern is just lazy and doesn't do anything interesting for me. But if tonal interest was there under it all, as a listener, I'd be more inclined to keep listening.
I think the MD is great for that additional tonal element, or underlying twisting of something that adds a certain magic to tracks.
I guess it depends on what sort of music you are doing, I see my MD as my go-to percussive and texture/rhythmic box and use it to support and add interest to ideas.