🇬🇧 Once a year, on Black Friday, I remind everyone that you can grab some of the most soulful tools from elementarysounds at a discount 🙂
Just listen to this…

🇬🇧 Time to pull a little “admin privilege.” Go check out these great remixes, vote for the one that hits you right… and if you happen to drop a checkmark next to mine on the way — I won’t complain ;)

Here are the ones I really liked.

🇬🇧 So... Looks like I made it onto the podium again in a remix contest. Another small step toward actually feeling like a musician. I’m slowly learning not to be shy about my music and not to listen to that inner imposter insisting I’m “not the real thing.”

🇬🇧 The video itself is in Russian, so here’s the summary in English.

In this video I share how a great YouTube breakdown completely changed the way I think about kick drums. Instead of just picking a sample, I tried rebuilding a kick from scratch on the Digitakt using three layers — sub, thump, and click — following the techniques from the video. With parameter locks and a bit of controlled randomness, I ended up generating a whole set of unique kicks that can be resampled into a drum chain. Super fun workflow and a great way to get original, characterful sounds.

🇬🇧 Does it annoy you too when gear wobbles from the slightest touch (even on video), or am I the only one with this problem?

🇬🇧 I only recommend the stuff I actually use myself… Black Friday, ten bucks, you know the drill.

🇬🇧 I honestly can’t figure out who Alphateta is making this for. They released Chordcat — and it sank without a trace. And now this sorta-not-Maschine-Micro, sorta-not-Akai-MPD…

As some of you already know, I recently got myself a Monome Norns (not the original — the shield version).
Drop by the stream today in a couple of hours (~18 CET) — I’ll be working on an iPad emulator for Monome Grid and Monome Arc.
Bad news - stream will be held in russian
- No music-making this time, just writing code for music.
- I’ll answer your Norns questions as much as I can — I barely understand half of it myself
- and we can just chat about life

A bit of context:
norns is many sound instruments. It’s a small, portable, open-source sound computer that runs scripts and DSP (Digital Signal Processing) on the fly.

Links: https://monome.org/docs/norns/ https://monome.org/docs/grid/ https://monome.org/docs/arc/
And here’s a YouTube showcase to give you an idea of “what this thing even is”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bydObN7gWME

🇬🇧 It’s a golden age for DIY music gear right now: affordable hardware multiplied by vibe coding
So maybe it’s time to stop grumbling about “Manufacturer A made Device B and it’s too multifunctional / not multifunctional enough / too expensive / too ugly / too pretty,” etc.
Don’t like it? Build something better 😉

🇬🇧 Are these just wet dreams? AI-generations? Or did some leaks actually happen?

🇬🇧 About Tonwerk…
I keep seeing people treat it like a “Digitakt 2 Pro Max” and try to apply their Digi-experience and Digi-expectations to it.

But the Digitakt is positioned as a “16-track drum computer & stereo sampler”.
Tonwerk, on the other hand, is a “polyphonic multisampler & audio processor”.

And that difference alone already tells you a lot.

My take: Tonwerk is a tool for sound design, OST work, or a very powerful FX processor. In any case, it’s not a sketchpad machine and not really about quick content churn.
It feels more like a device for careful, deliberate work — for people who know exactly what they want and why they want it.

New platform, new audience.

PS: I scrolled through the Tonwerk-related content Elektron is putting out on YouTube today, and honestly, it feels like they’re partly creating this misleading perception themselves.