Feature | 30 Years
WHAT IS IT?: SYNTHESISER AND SEQUENCER WITH ATTITUDE | LAUNCH YEAR: 2004 | LAUNCH PRICE: SFX-6 KEYBOARD: €1,950, 60 MODULE: €1,350
Like Clavia in the 1990s, Elektron were another Swedish company who designed products on their own terms. With the Monomachine they took the concept of the synth and sequencer groovebox into new dimensions, stuck it into an aluminium box and a keyboard shaped like a cricket bat, added a joystick, and came up with one of the best products of the 2000s.
Sometimes you get the impression that you don’t buy Elektron gear to serve a purpose, you serve the gear and it will take you wherever the hell it wants. You don’t necessarily approach Monomachine with a specific idea in mind – it’s more a collaborator. What you both come up with, though, will always sound great and have attitude. Monomachine was the grittier alternative to the ‘always lush, always smiling’ VA synths of the era; it would also give you dark ambience, low bit-rate industrial mechanics, the dirtiest of beats and, well, amazing results… if you let it.
It got quite a reputation, and even though it led to loads of other great products and lines, it is still the one piece of Elektron gear that is most in demand, commanding sky-high secondhand prices, particularly for the limited edition keyboard.
What we said at the time
“We were impressed by the range of tones we could coax from it, from classic to futuristic, and then there’s the fact that it’s a six-note polyphonic synth in disguise as well. The sequencer is detailed enough and full of unique creative possibilities that it can hold its own against computerbased packages. Elektron have taken the best of established ideas and mixed them with some maverick design spirit to give us an eminently usable instrument with bags of character and charm.”
Legacy
Using Monomachine might take a shift in your thinking. It utilises six internal sequencer tracks and six monosynth engines (Machines), each with eight Parameter Locks that can be tweaked and recorded. You get the original SID Machine that was based on the Commodore 64 SID chip behind Elektron’s very first product, the 1999 SidStation. Superwave is the more analogue Machine with five oscillator types. Others include DigiPro which delivers 32 waveforms and is often used for beat creation; FM+ for Frequency Modulation synthesis; GND for sine and noise (often not included as a main engine) and finally VO which is a voice modeller. Add a dedicated effects machine which can also process external signals and you had a very compelling setup.
Any single one of these Machines could have been the engine in any other hardware synth of that time, but having six plus flexible (and complex) effects routing gave Monomachine the kind of sonic prowess and depth that richly rewarded extended delving. But for those who all
