With the plethera of very capable grooveboxes now on the market and Elektrons lack-lustre recent offerings (syntakt was OK) Elektron needs a serious reboot to get back its mythical status. IMO there are two things to bring back:
Anyone agree?
Being a rytm owner I wasn’t interested in the syntakt but I don’t think there are a plethora of groove boxes offering anything more than the syntakt. What have I missed?
Not necessarily more. But that offer similar amounts of fun in different ways. Elektron used to be ‘head & shoulders’ above every other groovebox but things like P-locks and probability are common place now. Plus Cenk was so inspiring to watch. Like a jedi master showing us what was possible if you put the work in.
İ miss the short film era of elektron and definitely miss cenk’s presentations 🫂 the atmosphere in videos from MD and till Octatrack was beautifull
Edit: i think AR deserved its own short film aswell
[cough] title is misleading … needs a question mark at the end at least 
Mod Edit : Title since changed
A bit clickbaity sorry! I really want peoples engagement on this because I don’t think it has been brought up enough.
He’s at Ableton nowadays
Their whole Scandinavian forest adventure in a mysterious box has gone
Sure. But I reckon he’d come back.
cenk presented almost every machine available except for AH+FX and ST, and you say ST was OK by your standards, so…
which are?
I’d love to see Cenk back for the videos though, loved watching them (and still is)… inspirational!
The two model series boxes and silver box redesigns. It feels like the magic has gone and they’re out of ideas
No
the E25 is a limited edition, same as OT AE, or like pretty much any manufacturer doing limited editions, it’s a thing and many people like it.
calling the models lack-lustre is quite a stretch, many artists use them and in the right hands they are as much inspiration as any other instrument
In my opinion, nothing still comes close to the fun and inspiring workflow that Elektron offers. Ctrl+All remains unique: controlling the envelopes, filters, timbre of ALL tracks at once in ways that nothing else on the market can do, not even DAWs like Ableton Live.
Others caught up on probability etc - but in all honesty, who cares about probability percentages? It’s conditional trigs (1:2, 4:8, Fill, 1st) that make it useful to me, not rolling a dice every time a trig is played. And so far that’s also still Elektron only.
What Elektron needs to do, in my opinion, isn’t to bring back mystery or Cenk (all respect to him though) but they need to design a new line of grooveboxes that keeps all the fun of the Elektron workflow but offers it in a battery-powered package, with usb-c charging support, and with some god damn polyphony and sampling and synthesis in one box.
In other words, they need to stop the compartmentalization of all of their boxes and dare releasing a groovebox that does it all. Like a Syntakt but with polyphony, sampling capabilities, wrapped in a more modern chassis that doesn’t weigh 2 kilos. They were on to something with the model series but they were too greedy about crippling features to the point where they became useless for the masses. Every other competitor offers polyphony, and Elektron isn’t any bit more mysterious because they don’t.
It’s our job to push where these machines go.
I think Elektron tapped into reality. Cenk was your friendly neighbour next door. He knew you were in the bedroom watching Netflix but it didn’t matter. He wanted to put a smile on your face.
Cenk was a great demo guy for Elektron - I’d go so far as to say easily one of, if not the best in the industry IMHO. However he left for his own reasons, so you gotta respect that. I enjoyed immensely his presentations but it rarely influenced my purchasing decision, for multiple reasons, not least another persons skill set, taste, use case and way of working rarely matches anothers. Also because I never needed to see demos to know that I’d like Elektron gear because the brand speaks for itself at this point.
Deep machines - I think they are all pretty deep TBH, I do prefer the flagship machines personally, but they have to have a range of products to remain in business.
I knew that something like this would awake the bear, uh, I mean the dog.
I wonder if there’s any contribution that I can make to this topic that isn’t negative or comedic.
Accepting suggestions because those are the only two directions that I see this going in.