Digging into the Elektron Syntakt

I bought a Syntakt when they first came out. I reserved my pre-order at Robotspeak here in San Francisco (thanks guys!). I took it home and unboxed it and jammed around. First impressions were good. It had the classic Elektron feel (I have a Machinedrum and the Octatrack). It sounds great. It has interesting synth models that are varied and useful. It’s both analog and digital. It checks a lot of boxes.

There are some oddities about it due to the analog/digital hybrid nature of the beast. Certain channels are dedicated to analog and others to digital. There are four total analog tracks. One track is dedicated to the cymbal synth circuit. You can’t change it. It’s a little strange for a modern synth but I suppose given the limitations of the device it doesn’t matter that much. I think the voices of polyphony are limited on the digital side so you wouldn’t get 12 digital channels anyway (I think?).

I have some classic grooveboxes that are older and one limitation that seems to always exist is that you have to stop the transport to copy patterns or do much of anything besides drop in and out of record mode. The worst is having to stop the transport entirely to exit record mode. Some of the older Roland boxes are like this and it’s totally frustrating. Modern devices like the Syntakt don’t suffer from this problem but they have their own limitations. It’s weird that the Syntakt doesn’t have a track solo mode. It does have per-pattern mutes though. It does not have mute groups. Maybe that would have been the move instead of a solo mode. Cue mutes and activate the group. Maybe with an invert function which would effectively be a solo function.

None of the bells and whistles make any difference if it doesn’t sound good. To me it sounds good. In addition to having interesting engines, it’s selection of parameters is interesting and unique. Each sound has little things to tweak that I suppose are kind of macros or in some cases forms of distortion but there is no denying that this is a different kind of synth box.

I wish it had one more set of outputs. Maybe instead of two midi outputs. The box has a midi out and a midi thru. Seems like one would have sufficed. It’s super flexible in that the outputs can be used for DIN sync in addition to midi. I’m not sure how common that use case is or why Elektron decided to include this backward compatibility in such a modern product.

I like the big clicky buttons and shortcut keys for most things make it pretty easy to navigate once you get your fingers used to the motions. Some of the button locations are questionable since it takes two hands for some common operations but I don’t necessarily have any suggestions on how to improve it. Everything has tradeoffs and it’s not obvious to me what else might have been a factor in their decision making for the product.

I’m going to be using the Syntakt along with my Octatrack and I’ll probably write a little post on that setup as well.