The Machinedrum as a fractal instrument
I spent two grand on a Machinedrum, then I spent another $230 in cryptocurrency to have a Russian engineer ship me a custom-made plus drive (as Elektron stopped manufacturing them in 2010), snuck past the embargo by way of a courier in Tbilisi.
Naturally, one should not spend this kind of money without good reason. Thankfully, I can say that the Machinedrum is the most well-designed instrument I’ve ever used, is particularly well-suited for my tastes, and that it fits right in my sweet spot. And since I spent so much money I really should talk about it.
I had been, for a while now, conceiving a ‘fractal sequencer’. A sequencer is a consecutive series of steps, which represent either notes or silence, or some intermediary message information such as pitch slide or control data values. A fractal is a recursive structure where pieces emulate or encapsulate the whole.
My version of a fractal sequencer would be most akin to a harmonic series, where voltage frequencies attenuate in exact ratios as they increase in wavelength. Another analogue is the overtones of any string-based instrument - middle C might be 440hz, and one octave above it would be 880hz, one below would be 220hz, so a 1:2:4 ratio exists between them. In plain english - let the timings and melodic content of the sequence be determined proportionally to the timing and melodic content of the previous notes.
So, a middle C at 440hz could, like a branching tree, modulate to 1:2 at 220hz or 2:1 at 880hz, and from there further branches could be made available, and selected for via an algorithm or pseudo-randomness.
I have gone about starting to build such a construct using Puredata:
But boy, that’s going to take a while. Puredata, while fantastically interesting is a rabbit hole I’ll be going down for a long while.
Some other protocols I tested with were Midinous - a very cool visual sequencer that probably is, in terms of what I would like to make, the closest approximation of how such a thing might actually work:
I also tried using Nestup, a markup language used for denoting rhythms.
I reactivated my Twitter just to get these screenshots. That’s how much I love the Machinedrum - I would dive into mu from Deathnote for you, I would burn my feet on hot coals for you.
Finally, I am also now using tracker softwares and having the best time. Trackers are the true patrician’s way of writing music, and I’m sad I haven’t made the jump earlier despite knowing about them since before I even started making music. Here’s my first laughable attempt to write music on a tracker (this one being SchismTracker, a clone of 1992’s OG Impulse Tracker, originally written for MS-DOS), by transcribing Bach’s Wachet Auf symphony 4th movement, ruft uns die Stimme.
All of that to say that the Machinedrum, surprisingly, embodies the quality I wanted but not in a way that I would have ever come up with. The MD has fractalisation at its very core, from its rhythms, its sound design; virtually every aspect of its design is fractal, in a very compelling way.
I would be remiss to not include some examples of me using it.
The core of the MD is that it has 16 parts, each of which can be assignable to any number of what it calls ‘machines’, which are basically simplified synthesis engines. On a regular synth or drum machine, you would have either one or a few grand synth engines with all the standard bells and whistles - 2-3 oscillators or sound sources, 2 filters, 1-3 envelopes, and effects, with some controls for modulations, typically something like 2-4 LFOs and, at best, a modulation matrix for a larger variety of possible combinations. The MD, on the other hand, has no less than 64 synth engines, each assignable to as many of the 16 parts as possible.
Most of these machines are simplified for percussion synthesis, with something like 8 unique parameters ie. bass drum might have pitch, decay, ramp, ramp decay etc. Each part has its own independent filter, envelope and LFO, meaning there is a total of 16 filters and 16 LFOs. The LFOs are particularly remarkable, because they can be assigned to any other part, not just the one it’s linked to.
What does this mean? Well, it means one could have 16 ‘bass drums’ playing in sequence, or 10 bass drums with 2 snare drums and 4 hi-hats, or 1 ‘sin wave generator’ with 16 LFOs acting on it. Some of the machines are also, brilliantly, truly so brilliantly I have never seen this on any other instrument, made only to pass control messages rather than synthesize, meaning they act as ‘control machines’. I know that this is probably hard to visualize; I myself didn’t really get it until I started messing around with it.
We can imagine a theoretical drum kit consisting of 16 parts arranged like so:
BD - SD - CTR - x - HH - OH - CTR - x - RS - CP - CTR - x - SN - SW - CTR - CTRALL
So we have 4 groups of instruments, each consisting of two synth engines, a control machine, and an x denoting an empty slot. The final slot has a ‘control all’ machine.
The control machines, in a very 2003 kind of way, work by controlling the parameters of their ‘neighbors’. I am told this is something that was later developed on Elektron’s Octatrack into ‘neighbor machines’, and that this is a primitive version that inspired the later one. So the first CTR, on slot 3, works by acting on BD and SD because they are its ‘neighbors’.
Let’s say that CTR wants to modulate the pitch of BD and SD. Both of these machines, bass drum and snare drum, have a pitch control, and the pitch control is always in the first parameter slot (if you look at my picture of the MD, you will see it has 8 knobs - each of these correspond to a parameter slot. Each machine has exactly 8 or less parameter slots (actually they each have 24, but only 8 are unique to each machine, the others are the filter and envelope controls, as well as amplitude modulation)).
So if I turn the first knob on my CTR machine, it will affect the pitch on both the BD and the SD. Let’s say I now use the CTR machine’s LFO to perform this modulation for me. I attach a triangle wave modulator to the ‘SYN1’ control of my CTR machine. Now the LFO is modulating effectively at a { x : x` : y(x`) } ratio - the LFO modulates the SYN1 which modulates two pitch values for both BD and SD.
Now say I do this for all my 4 CTR machines - each one is modulating pitch for its two related neighbor machines. This is using 4 LFOs in total.. But I have 12 left. What can I do with those? I could use another 4 to say, modulate the decay or any other parameter. I can create further 1:1:2 relationships. Or, I could use them to modulate the already previously set LFOs, creating a { x : x^2 : y(x^2) : y^2(x^2) } relationship. And that would only use 8 LFOs, leaving 8 more to do with as I please. Perhaps you can see what I’m getting at here.
The final piece of the puzzle (of which I have barely even touched on, really, and is at best the first piece of a larger puzzle) is that there exists a CTR-ALL machine, which rather than act only on its neighbors, can act on all machines, including the previous control machines. Meaning, if I use the CTR-ALL machine to now modulate pitch, it will accumulate the modulation data on top of the previous control machines pitch modulation.
It’s a little abstract, but this basically means the MD is the only machine I’ve ever seen that has a built-in Fibonacci sequence. Almost anything about it can be modulated in a harmonic series, producing deep fractalisation. Within the micro, lies the macro, and vice versa.
As a final note I would like to say that I have long heard of the Machinedrum, and its hot sister the (even more expensive) Monomachine, because they both launched in the early 2000s and always carried a prestige. I knew Autechre used them on their 2008 tour to incredible effect. I kind of ignored a lot of Elektron’s instruments for the stupid reason that, when I got to NYC, everyone I knew who made techno used an Octatrack and I thought I was the cool one for using an MPC. Really silly in retrospect, because the OT is another brilliantly designed machine, and not really comparable to an MPC beyond a surface level (I’m looking to acquire one, if anyone is selling ^_^).
What they really represent is the height of digital synthesis. Anyone who grew up in my era or purchased any music gear throughout the 2000s and 2010s knows that the entire industry pivoted toward analog synthesis in an almost fetishistic way. Everyone and their mother, including Elektron, started making analog instruments, and selling boatloads of them to hobbyists - except the new analog instruments don’t sound anything like the ones from the 70s they were trying to sound like. The problem is that analog instruments are necessarily constrained by their very nature, and very rarely do anything new. There are good ones, of course, typically in the higher price range, but I think only now after two decades of pseudo-musician hobbyist synth cooming are we back to appreciating finely designed instruments as being actually useful and interesting. And digital synthesis leads the pack on that.
Playing with this Machinedrum has changed the way I think about instrument design on a fundamental level. It’s a totally unique instrument that plays by its own rules, and I don’t think there’s anything else like it.
That is, of course, until I drop another three grand on a Monomachine.