I bought this as an introduction to elektron gear and to use as my first drum machine/groove box. The workflow is great, although I admit my only other synth experience is with a reface dx and a moog mother 32, so take that for what its worth. Very fun to play with it, and I find myself losing hours creating sounds and simple tracks, but chaining them etc. and creating whole songs is less easy, even when I know what I want in my head - translating it is not necessarily easy. Polyphony would have been nice on single tracks, but that is not possible, so I use multiple tracks of the same synth engine playing different notes on the same steps of the each of the tracks respective sequences, as I do not like the chord machines the model:cycles comes with. A lack of individual outs would not be a problem when recording into a daw had cycles been able to make use of the overbridge program in order to port individual tracks. Unfortunately in order to not cannibalise sales from the syntakt, it cannot do this. As such, one must mix on the machine itself and hope that the levels are not problematic when combined with other instruments later in the workflow of the daw. Alternatively isolate each track and record them separately and individually in the daw where you can mix them later. This is annoying as the technology exists to skip this (overbridge), and I do not believe the hardware is incapable of accomodating this. I have had to buy a syntakt in order to not constantly stop and interrupt my creative process in order to achieve a useable final product in my mixes.
