Elektron Machinedrum SPS-1UW

[andrewj]

Has anyone used this unit in a real production?

I bought it months ago and liked the sounds a lot. But I did not use the sample ram. Just 2MB! But I had the luck to see an incredible live performance of this unit at this weekend. The guys were just using one Machinedrum and a Technics 1210 with a handful of vinyls! They sampled just some loops of these vinyls and rocked the house over an hour!

The editing is not as deep as in actual MPCs at all, but this unit sounds incredible! 12Bit!!!

My recommendation to all of you!

I love this unit!

[sequoia]

Hey Andrew,

I have a regular machinedrum and I was wondering if you can actually sample into all of the available sample locations via the inputs? I thought that I heard you could only sample into a few machines and the other locations had to be filled via midi sample dump?

2mb isn't a big deal to me because I already make whole songs with my sp1200. I cosign on the machinedrum being a fun and inspiration piece, I've used mine a ton. If I can sample into all the slots, I'll definitely do the upgrade, thanks for the input! thumbsup

[sequoia]

okay, rtfm right!

They finally have a manual addendum up for the UW. It appears that you can only sample via the inputs into 2 of the ram machines. The other 32 machines are sample dump only? I guess I'll stick with the sp/emax for 12bit sampling.

[Tibbon]

The other machines are NOT 12 bit from what I can tell.

I got back mine with the UW upgrade and it's amazing. You can only load the samples over Sysex (and from what I can tell you can't do the dump from something like an Akai sampler or whatever... at least not with my S5K). You dump from their C6 program on the computer normally. It takes a bit of time, perhaps 10 minutes or so to transfer the 2mb from the computer, and then it's there until you delete it.

So you can't sample most of your drumhits live and stuff, however that would be a giant PITA, and I have NO desire to do editing like you'd do on an old sampler with a 2 line display. I much prefer using a computer program, and slicing as i see fit, and then transfering it.

What you can do is sample from the inputs to the RAM machines however, or sample from the outputs. Sounds boring, but it's not once you realize what you can do it with it. There are two of these RAM machines.

Let's say in a pattern you set it to record on beat 1 until beat 8, then on beat 9 you play that same recorded information but at 2x the speed. Or you bit-reduce it, or you reverse it, whatever. Since you have two machines available you can have them resampling each other. Pretty fun stuff.

My main complaint about the MD-UW at the moment is that you can't toggle the 'pitch' of the samples to be all listed as relative pitches, as you can with several of the other machines (making the assumption that your original key was whatever..).

the MD-UW rocks my rocks. Seriously, this machine does so much synthesis-wise it's not even funny. I do wish that more than one LFO (perhaps 3 or 4 even?) were available to modulate things, alas you can only use one.

The CTL-A machine is pretty fun too.

I'm not using the sampling enough at the moment. I want to (and maybe I should do right now) make some sound of tools or whatever noise and load in there. Some better high hats too.

[Tibbon]

2MB IS plenty. What is harder is only having 32 sample locations. That's easy to fix however. Since the 32 sample locations with all short hits still don't take up all of the 2mb, you can in esssence put multiple samples in each, and mess with the start/end times. Works well with waveforms for bass parts.

I have my Sidstation running into the inputs of mine sometimes, which is pretty fun. Using the MIDI machines to control the Sid is even better. That thing really should have a step sequencer permanantly attached to it.