Mini vs Oxi E16?

General discussion
1

Hello-

New to the forum. I’m in the market for a MIDI controller and I’ve been doing some research on my options and the Electra lineup came up in a thread about the Oxi E16 which has been at the top of my list. The full size Electra One Mk2 looks amazing but it may be more than I need and the Mini seems to check a lot of boxes for me- it has less tactile controls than the Oxi but it’s also cheaper and seems more customizable. Anyone care to weigh in on the relative pros and cons of one vs the other?

My use case is for live use, I have an Elektron Octatrack that is my main brain/clock, I also use an Oxi One as a more full-featured sequencer, a KMI K-Mix is my mixer, and for synths, a Beetlecrab Tempera (unrelated but this thing is amazing- cannot say enough good things about it, can’t believe there isn’t more hype surrounding it) an Elektron Digitone and a modular with a Befaco MIDI-CV converter as well as various other non-MIDI devices. All of those things are awesome but there is A LOT of paging through menus to get to various places and I want to consolidate as much as I can into a MIDI controller. Particularly I want to setup some scenes or pages where I have control of a number of different parameters for different devices on the same page- for instance, a page with volume and pan control over the Octatrack audio tracks but also the sends on the K-Mix, etc.

From what I can see, both the E16 and the Electra’s allow this pretty easily. What are the relative pros & cons of each? Does one leap out as a better choice? Should I bite the bullet and go for the full size Electra One (ha ha) I welcome any thoughts- thanks in advance

2

Hi and welcome,
I stepped into the Electra One range because of its flexibility (I can solve almost any synth puzzle with it), the support we get from Martin and Zdenek which is, let’s admit it, rare in our Music World, and the awesome user forum where ideas, tips ànd results are shared.

The Mini is brand new , so it might take some time to stabilize. But the more people help out, the faster it goes of course.

I have it since Friday, and build a preset for the Evil Pet granular synth for it. That went rather well, but their were some challenges along the way. All in all it was built and tested in a couple of hours. So that’s promising.

If you want to use the Mini for simple stuff, like controlling various MIDI CC for multiple devices out of one place, then that is very, very easy to do.

The depth of this thing is simply amazing, yet it comes at a prize: if you wanna make specific solutions like for instance build an entire editor for a synth that is able to request it to tell the E1 how a patch is built up whereby the synth manufacturer not only uses MIDI CC, but also SysEx , NRPN and the likes, you’ll need to dive into that matter. But this synth community may help you along the path.

As for modular, the E1 doesn’t send or read CV’s (not the current models anyways), so you"ll always need convertors like the Befaco you mentioned.

For your other gear (I don’t have any of them), it’s important you find their MIDI implementation guide, usually inside the manual. If you don’t find a synth MIDI implementation chart or guide from the manafufacturer or on the internet, you won’t be able to control it decently without a PC (if at all).