Analog Four teaser trailer

  On 11/15/2012 at 12:03 AM, sirch said:

too pricey for me, for what it is. interested to see&hear what it's fully capable of, though, because an analog synth made by 'Elektron' sounds interesting&enticing&promising right off the bat...

would've been better with a 2 or 3 octave keyboard instead of those poxy buttons, imo. looks a lil' too much like the octatrack to me.

4 analog voices with 2 oscs and subs each with sequencer and storage @1099 € That´s a fucking bargain.

I think so too.

Even the fashionable 400-500 euro mono synths (Dark Energy etc..), or even the monotribe now seem overpriced compared to what you get with the A4, imho..

Before the A4 was announced, I kinda wanted a x0xb0x, but now.. fuck it.. gotta save up some cash and get that synth :]

  On 11/15/2012 at 1:24 PM, megapussi said:

  On 11/15/2012 at 12:03 AM, sirch said:

too pricey for me, for what it is. interested to see&hear what it's fully capable of, though, because an analog synth made by 'Elektron' sounds interesting&enticing&promising right off the bat...

would've been better with a 2 or 3 octave keyboard instead of those poxy buttons, imo. looks a lil' too much like the octatrack to me.

 

4 analog voices with 2 oscs and subs each with sequencer and storage @1099 € That´s a fucking bargain.

lol, a bargain. not really, it's pretty basic and look likes the octa-cack. no keys, not rackable either... and only 4 voices.

I guess what commands the higher price is the sequencer feature? otherwise I don't really get what the fuss is about.

but I suppose because it's brand new, analog, and it's Elektron, blah blah, plus all analog synths cost a bomb when first released anyway..

no doubt loads of people will eat it right up i'm sure.

Two osc's and two sub osc per voice is pretty good. Also it's loaded with modulation options. If it sounds decent, it's a bargain imo.

Edit: Also a bandpass and multi-mode filter per voice, overdrive and variable wave shape. My concern is that the sound character might be lacking due to the amount of attention given to feature set.

  On 11/15/2012 at 3:50 PM, sirch said:

  On 11/15/2012 at 1:24 PM, megapussi said:

  On 11/15/2012 at 12:03 AM, sirch said:

too pricey for me, for what it is. interested to see&hear what it's fully capable of, though, because an analog synth made by 'Elektron' sounds interesting&enticing&promising right off the bat...

would've been better with a 2 or 3 octave keyboard instead of those poxy buttons, imo. looks a lil' too much like the octatrack to me.

 

4 analog voices with 2 oscs and subs each with sequencer and storage @1099 € That´s a fucking bargain.

 

lol, a bargain. not really, it's pretty basic and look likes the octa-cack. no keys, not rackable either... and only 4 voices.

I guess what commands the higher price is the sequencer feature? otherwise I don't really get what the fuss is about.

but I suppose because it's brand new, analog, and it's Elektron, blah blah, plus all analog synths cost a bomb when first released anyway..

no doubt loads of people will eat it right up i'm sure.

parameter locks/slides on a x4 analogue synth engine is pretty fucking ground breaking and thats before we get into an Elektron arpeggiator

kinda glad I got rid of my Spectralis a month or so ago

  On 11/16/2012 at 1:06 AM, soundwave said:

 

parameter locks/slides on a x4 analogue synth engine is pretty fucking ground breaking and thats before we get into an Elektron arpeggiator

 

kinda glad I got rid of my Spectralis a month or so ago

yep, The Tempest in theory can do this (less intuitively) but since it's crippled like a mofo it's not even going to compare to the Analog four

right now it's a bargain, and it's awesome

1 or 2 years later it will be hard to sell for the price that you bought it for (let alone more than) and there will be other cool machines wiht a lot more polyphony and features

so be warned about losing yer money

when the great roland beast turns out of its lazy sleep it will be pushing out 128 polyphony full multitimbral analogue monsters for 500 quid

  On 11/16/2012 at 11:53 AM, chunky said:

right now it's a bargain, and it's awesome

1 or 2 years later it will be hard to sell for the price that you bought it for (let alone more than) and there will be other cool machines wiht a lot more polyphony and features

so be warned about losing yer money

when the great roland beast turns out of its lazy sleep it will be pushing out 128 polyphony full multitimbral analogue monsters for 500 quid

my Monomachine is still shit hot next to any other decent hardware and even tho its worth half what I paid I've had a decent run from it and if Elektron ever go bust prices will soar

Roland make toss for high street music shops

  On 11/16/2012 at 11:53 AM, chunky said:

right now it's a bargain, and it's awesome

1 or 2 years later it will be hard to sell for the price that you bought it for (let alone more than) and there will be other cool machines wiht a lot more polyphony and features

so be warned about losing yer money

when the great roland beast turns out of its lazy sleep it will be pushing out 128 polyphony full multitimbral analogue monsters for 500 quid

haha not too likely I'd say. A 128 poly analog synth would be absurd. There needs to be a physical oscillator for each voice, so that puts a very real limit on the price being so low. It's not like a digital synth where all you need is a faster processor to add voices. Even the Roland MKS-80 (which is a fucking HOSS) only has 8 voices, and that was and still is several thousand bucks.

I'm guessing that it will be multitimbral. I think it's quite a reasonable price for something with a very good sequencer, and analog voices.

I understand a bit more about it now and it sounds alright.

still, £1k... i'd never spend that much on something like this that's brand new, that could turn out to be a twat (to use) in Elektron clothing.

nested menus anybody?

personally i'd rather have an MKS-80, or a Korg Mono/Poly, or any of a whole bunch of other (guaranteed) awesome analog synths, and a PC... and maybe wait a couple of years to pick one of these up for 1/3 of the retail price (if they're decent).

also, while I agree Roland have made a lot of plastic shite for a long time... they could be working on an absolute beast right now, and I bet it won't cost a grand on release.

also, that trailer is so shit.

No MIDI sequencing, just clock send and knob twists unfortunately.

oi mateys, ya'll never heard of the intel processor/moore's law??

the amount of transistors that ya can fit on a chip has increased to a ridiculous amount in the last 30 years

mks 80 is ancient in electronci terms

the only reasons that there arent 128 analogue poly synths is that the companies didnt want to make them as there wasnt any demand

now that the demand is there we just need to wait for the bigger companies to acknowledge the demand

with modern IC technology, it is not a big issue to make 128 polyphony

they could do 128 poly oscillator IC, then a 128 Filter IC or whatever

the possibilities are ridiculous

money + companies + talented engineers required

this aint the 1970s any more

a lot of the thinking about what's possible is 40 years out of date

SHIT IS POSSIBLE SON

alesis andromeda was 16 voice and that was 10 years ago

think of what your pc was like 10 years ago and what a modern pc is?

dude. Analog oscillators are not built from transistors. The moore's law analogy does not work here, as you cannot shrink other types of components at the same rate as transistors. An analog oscillator is made of a lot of other stuff, and good deal of that does have limits on shrinkability due to physics. The andromeda was like $2,500 when it came out!! Adjust that for inflation and it's like $3,300.

Microcontroller size is really irrelevant to analog synths.

  On 11/16/2012 at 10:30 PM, Drahken said:

No MIDI sequencing, just clock send and knob twists unfortunately.

oh that's too bad, no wonder it's so less expensive than other elektron gear. What kind of CV options does this thing have. I heard it can clock to DIn and also send din out but can it do a gate cv/pitch cv out? If it doesnt do midi out, having cv out would make it pretty enticing

Why you guys hating so hard on the Octatrack? It's tough to wrap your head around but it can do some crazy shit. Still lusting hard for the MnM and the MD tho. I will definitely pass on the A4, I just don't have that much of a boner for analog and I'd much rather have the MnM's expanded processing & MIDI capabilities.

  On 11/17/2012 at 6:30 AM, chunky said:

oi mateys, ya'll never heard of the intel processor/moore's law??

the amount of transistors that ya can fit on a chip has increased to a ridiculous amount in the last 30 years

Yes. Moore's Law. Applies to digital electronics. Not analogue.

  On 11/17/2012 at 6:30 AM, chunky said:

alesis andromeda was 16 voice and that was 10 years ago

think of what your pc was like 10 years ago and what a modern pc is?

The Andromeda is great but weighs a ton. Unfortunately analogue electronics hasn't suddenly changed in a decade like digital has. So a 16 voice poly with such a deep UI is still going to weigh a ton.

  On 11/17/2012 at 6:30 AM, chunky said:

they could do 128 poly oscillator IC, then a 128 Filter IC or whatever

lol just no. Please go and read about analogue electronics and IC engineering. As soon as you start building that many oscillators/filters/whatever on a single die, you will have MASSIVE amounts of crosstalk and oscillator locking. There would be no advantage of analogue over digital by that point - everything that most people want from analogue would be redundant (i.e. no drift per different voice, no detune, etc.)

You CAN do a lot with specialised ICs (think Curtis chips, also arcade synth chips) and I'd love to hear a commercial poly SID (I'm sure someone over at Midibox has done just that at some stage). BUT it's doubtful that it's going to happen soon with all of those old chips now pretty much unobtainable from the perspective of mass production. However, if one of the big players designed another synth voice IC for an analogue polysynth....

Whilst we're talking about Roland I still don't understand why they haven't just remade their own TB303. It's so blatently obvious.

  On 11/18/2012 at 2:11 AM, sweepstakes said:

Why you guys hating so hard on the Octatrack? It's tough to wrap your head around but it can do some crazy shit. Still lusting hard for the MnM and the MD tho. I will definitely pass on the A4, I just don't have that much of a boner for analog and I'd much rather have the MnM's expanded processing & MIDI capabilities.

the only reason i hate on it as much as i do is that it doesn't have a recycle like beat sensitivity slicing, as far as i can tell. You can only feed it things that are already loops to make use of the slice function. In my book that makes it really out-dated, but if i'm wrong i'd be happy to hear it since i still have some interest in the unit. I do a lot of beat slicing but rarely ever out of proper loops, sometimes i'll just take a 30 second file of say a drum jazz solo and use it to make a kit out of in software like ableton or reaktor

That's true, but it is fairly easy to slice on it, especially with that nice knob-based zoom control in the editor. And it seems to me that it's more intuitive to improvise on a grid than using transient detection anyway. However, I agree that it would be a very nice thing to have, and that does come up at elektron-forums a lot. Hopefully that will get added in a future OS update.

  On 11/18/2012 at 3:45 AM, sweepstakes said:

That's true, but it is fairly easy to slice on it, especially with that nice knob-based zoom control in the editor. And it seems to me that it's more intuitive to improvise on a grid than using transient detection anyway. However, I agree that it would be a very nice thing to have, and that does come up at elektron-forums a lot. Hopefully that will get added in a future OS update.

if it does i will very strongly consider buying one. I'm just sort of opposed to making music with loops, I've only done it for about a year when i first got into Ableton and i don't think i'll ever do it again.

Ableton runs so stable on the computer anyways that until the OCtatrack is sort of the experimental real-time tweakable sampling beast i want it to be, I'd rather just use ableton.

Yeah, I rarely use loops with mine. It seems like a pretty experimental real-time tweakable sampling beast to me, but I haven't used Ableton and maybe that's the same deal or better.

i'd be curious after you've explored Ableton a little bit how you think it differs and compares to the OCtatrack's handling of loops, as a pure sampler Abelton isn't mind blowing, but it's far advanced when it comes to loop composition imo.

For me something like a V-synth by Roland (at least in theory) is more of my style of hardware sampler since the goal is to be able to use samples granular to make complex synth textures out of. You could use just a recorded voice sample and turn it into a beautiful pad since the time stretching has almost no artifacts, or just use the formant shifting to change the flavor of it without changing the fundamental pitch. Unfortunately Roland totally dropped the ball on the whole sample librarian aspect, it has no more than 64 megs of sampling memory and switching memory slots takes up to 5 minutes of load time. IT's a shame really the Vsynth could be an amazing sampler if it had more memory. It's sort of like an SK1 on steroids with a little bit of Kontakt thrown in but just with shit memory.

we'll see in ten years time dudes

meks me pee a little inside mah pants:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB0PPFLbeHs

this guy has some pretty convincing demos of the A4 integrating with other Elektron gear: https://soundcloud.com/venndiagram

(dunno how to embed soundcloud with tapatalk)

generally, people cream over the FX and sequencer enhancements.. comparatively there doesn't seem to be that much praise for the filters or OSCs used, like omg best filters ever, but apparently it's quite possible to convincingly emulate a range of classic sounds if that is wanted... well i know i definitely want this thing, probably have to sit it out a month or two though....

i know it will be huge fun using it with the MDUW...

but the A4 sounds like a pretty convincing drum machine itself: https://soundcloud.com/darenager/elektron-a4-analog-drum-sounds

watmm seems less interested..?