Let's address the elephant in the room first: Yes, this product was launched in a disastrous state - which sadly seems to have become the new standard in this industry (just look at Torso Electronics or 1010Music). I've only bought mine after the 1.10 update fixed the most glaring issues, and still my expectations were quite low - but boy have they been exceeded!
Previous samplers by Elektron always hinted at the possibility of writing full tracks on them, and if you were dedicated enough you *could* pull it off - but only by embracing all sorts of limitations. Some people like that, I never did. The Tonverk takes those limits and completely throws them out of the window. After using it for a while I regularly find myself at a point where a pattern is musically fleshed out to the point of having too much going on - and i *still* have 3-4 unused tracks! It's just nuts.
64 voices of polyphony? Yup. Access to up to 1024 drum sounds within a single subtracks machine? Hell yeah. Crossfade looping, Granular sampling, Multisamples, P-lockable sample slots, using single cycle waveforms as oscillators - yes, all of that. *Incredibly* long FX chains? You bet! A multitude of ways to do sidechain compression, bus processing, incorporating external send fx, autosampling your favorite VST patches, turning raw eurorack oscillators into synth voices via the internal VCA/VCF and processing it to hell and back... I could go on forever. There's SO much in here. So what about everyone's favorite checklist items Timestretching and Slicing? Probably one or two updates away, but honestly not something I've missed even once while using this.
That insane amount of flexibility does come at a price in terms of mental overhead though. Since everything within the Tonverk is so modular you can have each pattern be completely different in terms of which track does what, how the gainstaging works et cetera. This makes it less immediate for live jamming, but honestly i feel like that use case is already covered quite well by Elektron's existing product line. The Tonverk is more of a science lab for meticulously crafting intricate compositions. And trust me, it's still way more immediate than the Octatrack.
The upside is that as opposed to Elektron's previous offerings this machine never seems to suggest the need for anything else besides it - except as sampling fodder to be absorbed into it of course. I've never liked having to manage projects, patterns et cetera on more than one machine at once, much preferring to fully dedicate my attention to one machine. The Tonverk truly rewards that, while still giving you the freedom to add tons of external processing via its 6 outputs in case you ever grow tired of its sound.
With all that being said, there's still small issues and bugs here and there. Some parameters are scaled weirdly or move a bit too fast when you turn the encoders, sometimes p-locks and LFOs behave in weird ways on subtracks - tiny details like that remind you that this is still a work in progress. But all in all I've not yet run into any issue where I've had to restart the machine or lost any work.
I'd absolutely recommend this one to anyone wanting to make adventurous electronic music. If you can't pull it off with Tonverk? Skill issue.
