Back from Finland

OK, 9 days was a long time to be away from Pat and I think both of us are getting worse at putting up with that. Karelian Skies was a musical success, had a groovy time with some fab musicians as expected. Rather too much focus on practising for my personal tastes and consequently saw very little of the country. Still, such is life, didn't want to be the moaner so toed the line. Anyway, it turns out they have lots of trees and lakes. :)
Feeling tired but content. Now back to work. Well, tomorrow.

While there I had some time to assess both the Elektron Analog Four and Studiologic Sledge in a live environment. Here are my thoughts:

Sledge 
Pros 
Large and well-spaced knobs
The colour is fab (some will disagree)
Infinite reverb
Wavetables
FM is kinda wild
Wheels feel nice and keyboard acceptable
Three oscillators and three LFOs
Loads of patch memories
Superb octave switches
Some great Wavetables even if poorly documented. Actually make that 'not documented'.

Cons
Delay is pretty shit and glitchy
Steppy bi-polar env amount - really annoying
Sync sounds nasty
Lack of aftertouch routing
Gets louder in mono mode
Velocity routing fixed and rubbish
Arpeggiator key-synced and no latch button
Would prefer faster and more extensive modulation destination selection. Would replace 10s hold with general hold for notes and arpeggios.

Summary 
Would happily have one for its playability and versatility even if a few bits are poorly-implemented, steppy or nasty. It's controls make it and I love the colour, especially under stage lights. Have programmed some patches on it I really like and in a very short time. 

And...

Analog four needs:
Mutes per pattern with half-lit track led for tracks containing trigs
Ability to do a fix of transpose, rewriting all note data (note to self: check it can't already)
Track activity display
Don't disable the screen completely in trig mute mode, it's stupid!
Disable pattern select timeout (grrr!)
Improve live pattern copy to work in all modes seamlessly

Improve multiple trig copy
Different clock divisions per track
Naming patterns and banks (oh, please!)
Common mixer per bank rather than per kit. If enabled mixer can work at bank or project level or as now. Without this you can't safely reload kits and you have to stick to one kit per bank/song or risk total fuckups between pattern switches.
Note repeat as per Analog Rytm
Trig mute to apply either to notes, parameter locks or both, choice at bank level
Pattern resync without having to load new one then reload it