New elektron gear

Citation : Hi there,

We are working on a new OS, but at the moment we're very busy with the newly released MKII units.

Jon
Elektron

Citation : Hi all! The time is soon 11 PM here in Sweden and winter appears to be approaching fast. So, close to 40 hours have passed since we released the MKII versions of our products and it has been interesting to read the posts here at the forum. It is as we expected, some people liked the updates and others had their doubts. However, after reading many of the posts, I feel there are certain things that need to be set straight.

The main reason why the MKII units were released was because we really didn’t have any choice. Vital components of the MKI’s had become obsolete and because of this the internals of both the Machinedrum and the Monomachine had to be redesigned. While we were at it, we also chose to improve certain areas of the units. Sure – we could have kept everything just the same, but we felt a little vitamin injection would do no harm. After all, surviving in the music industry is not the easiest of things and when you get the chance to hone your knives it is unwise not to do it.

If you have kept track of our homepage you would have noticed that we haven’t been selling anything for over two months. This was both due to delivery problems from the factory, but also because we didn’t want to sell MKI units when we knew we would release MKII’s. If we wanted, we could have sold MKI units until the day before the release of the MKII’s. Two months of basically no sales is quite frankly not very good for a small company like us as we rely solely on the income from our units. But we chose to be as caring as possible to our potential customers-to-be.

We also want to be as caring as possible to our current customers. One question that has arisen is obviously what will happen to all of you already owning a Machinedrum or a Monomachine. The simple answer is of course that we will still support your units. New OS’s will be released for both the MD and the MM. After all, MKI machines still compromise 99.9% of all Elektron units in existence. Some of the things found in the MKII units will not be possible to incorporate in the MKI’s due to hardware differences, for example the user waveforms soon to be found in the Monomachine MKII, but we aim to bring the MKI units as close as possible to the MKII’s in terms of features. At the moment it is hard to say exactly what will be implemented and not, but at the end of the day I hope and think you will be satisfied.

Daniel’s name has popped up here and there. Please remember that he safeguarded himself by writing (regarding releasing new versions of the same model) “I can't promise it won't ever happen”. For the record, during a meeting everyone here at Elektron, including Daniel, came to the conclusion that taking the MKII path would be the only viable solution.

As you might’ve noted we haven’t exactly brought forward the big artillery to salute the advent of the MKII’s. The reason for this is that we really don’t consider them as “new” products, but as the name alludes, updates to our current line. This inevitably brings us to the final stop of this lengthy excursion – what about the future? All I can say is that new stuff will be released and that we have a quite clear image of what the future will bring. This future is, to cite Jony Ive when being asked by Steve Jobs what he thought about the newly released iPhone, “not too shabby” looking.

The music machine quest continues!