Yesterday, I had a session on the Elektron Tonverk using a portable battery plugged into it’s USB-C port for power. It worked really well.

I have a feeling that the Tonverk might be exactly what I’ve been after for a while: a very powerful and capable machine that is portable, fairly self-contained (as in it can cover all the bases for a piece of music – playback of materials, processing), and aimed at more experimental approaches to composition. That’s another thing: this machine does feel like one that is leaning a little more into the composition side of ‘doing music’, rather than one aspect of music making, such as making drums or making synths, or solely the performance of music. I think with future updates, it’s just going to continue to get better and have more functions added to it.

It has copped quite a lot of negativity recently, and this has been interesting to see. I feel like people who are upset about it have some grounds for their arguments, but are also being unreasonable at times. Sure, the device has bugs and some glitches, but it’s nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. And I feel like people went into the announcement of the machine with a clear idea of what they want the machine to be, only to be disappointed at the fact that it didn’t align to  their expectations. I think many people just wanted an Octatrack mk3. Even after using it for only a few days, and it still being in its infancy, I can definitely see that it is something entirely new for Elektron, borrowing from parts of their other machines, but really taking a new approach. I’m very excited for it.

I think it would be a great device to begin a whole record on. It has everything there, and it would be a nice exercise to gather a bunch of materials onto the SD card, start a new project, and just build everything on the machine. This would be good for at least getting a collection of tracks to the point where they can then be further processed and mixed in the DAW. But all of the sequencing, rhythms, some processing, and core elements could be there.

I also love the idea of sampling things into it from external sources like my phone or iPad. This makes it a really portable machine that I could make a little case for, containing the external battery, a 3.5mm – dual 1/4-inch cable, and some headphones to be able to take the machine anywhere, do some sampling, and make whole pieces anywhere.

There are a couple of methods for sampling with the Tonverk:

First is normal ‘melodic sampling’ of sampling in a note and playing this back polyphonically. Multi-sampling is an extension of this to capture more samples per sound/synth patch (samples for different pitches and different velocities).

The second the approach is that of looping parts of longer recordings, eg. for tape loop-inspired approaches. I can load in a long take of me playing some melodic material on an instrument (just an improv), and then in the Tonverk, I can just play a small portion of this back by playing a single pitch and holding it for a portion of time, looping it. I could have multiple of these going, perhaps some at different loop lengths. If I was using the subtracks machine, I could have loads of these going – 8 per track, on each/any of the 8 tracks. The other two playback machines (single player and multisample) are designed specifically for melodic sampling, so I think subtracks would be the best way to go about it.

I’d really be keen to test this process out to make some Taylor Deupree-style music. These loops could be processed by a couple of insert FX, the bus tracks, and sent to the send tracks.

Excited to dive in more 🙂