Control Digitone Track Mutes via Octatrack?

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

Hi fellow Elektron fam. I need some help! I’m a MIDI noob and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get my Octatrack MKII to control track mutes on the Digitone. I’ve looked at manuals and videos (and have read everything I can find here) for a few hours now and I can’t figure out how to make it work. Please help! I found that mutes are controlled on CC 94, but I don’t know exactly what to do with that information. Currently I have transport and tempo sync’d just fine. The Digitone tracks are sequenced on the Digitone itself (I know now that I could’ve just sequenced them on the Octatrack and the mutes would’ve been easier) - I just want to simply turn on and off tracks on the Digitone via the Octatrack arranger. Any help would be AWESOME.

Thanks everyone!

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Muting the 4 Digitone MIDI tracks with Octatrack
#2

You’d need to set up 4 midi tracks on OT, each with it’s own channel (using note setup page) and corresponding to the DN channels, by default would be channels 1-4. Next enable a cc control for cc 94 on each track using the cntrl1 pages.

On step 1 of each midi track place a lock trig (function+Trig) and lock cc 94 to a value to be either muted or unmuted… I don’t know what those values are though, you’ll have to experiment. It’s probably 0 for muted and any other value unmuted, but I’ve never done this so don’t know…

Now for every pattern used in the arrangement, have the 4 midi tracks set up with lock trigs on step1 for their mute/u mute status…

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MIDI Questions/Concepts
#3

Thanks so much! I didn’t think about needing trigs. I’ll try this out and report back! =)

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#4

Hopefully the mute/unmute will be quick enough to not cut off the beginning of the track… If it doesn’t work we can try using the lock trigs at the end of the previous pattern, either by using a specific pattern for this in the arranger, or putting an a:b condition on the lock trigs to only trigger after a certain number of repeats…

Might be other ways as well if these don’t work out, let us know how it goes…

#5

Hey Open_Mike, so your advice was great. I set up everything and changing the CC value does mute/unmute the track - so that’s an awesome start. The problem is that it only seems to work when I turn the knob itself to change the value. The P-Locks don’t seem to actually do anything. I can see the value change when I “check” the P-Locks, but it doesn’t really seem to work. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

#6

Hmm…
Make sure the midi track is not muted and another thing to consider is that the OT will only send a cc plock value if it is different than the last value sent as a way to keep midi data down. If you haven’t, figure out what cc values mute and unmute by experimenting with the knob, I don’t know if it’s 0 and not 0 like I said above as I haven’t tried. Then with the knob make it so the track is in the opposite mute state of the plock and it should work when you press play or on the next cycle…

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#7

Ah hah! That’s what did it!

I actually was able to remove p-locks entirely, where I have both Track 1 and Track 2 transmitting on Channel 1 to the Digitone - with the entire OT track’s CC 94 value set to 0 or 1, and I swap mute states on either track to get it to play or not play. This actually works better too because now, in the arranger mode, I can just control the OT track mute states there! I just need 2 OT midi tracks per Digitone synth track, but that works since it’s 8 and 4 respectively. This is great! Thanks for pushing me in the right direction @Open_Mike!

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#8

Hi everybody, i’m trying to figure out how to setup the OT and DN that allows me to control the 4 DN MIDI tracks with the OT especially for MUTING . The idea is for ex when i’m jamming with the 2 machines, to use the OT mixer to MUTE and UNMUTE the 8 audio tracks of the OT + the 4 tracks of the DN via MIDI

Connection AUDIO : DN (Master Out) > (In A/B) OT // MIDI : OT (MIDI Out) > DN (MIDI In)

Is anyway possible this?

Thanks in advance

#9

So you want to mute unmute DN tracks with Mixer page MIDI TRACKS MUTES?
You told me you succeded once?

I think the easiest is to sequence DN with OT, mute its midi tracks, but I’m not sure you’d be able to plock things in DN.

DN track mute is controlled by CC94. I don’t know if it toggles mute / unmute or if it’s something like this.
value = 0>mute,
value 1-127>unmute.
Possible to check that?

@Unifono did you succeed to do it?

#10

I think i’ve done it once but i don’t know if it was me bugging or the machines

Yes this

Another possibility but in this case the program changes it will be not the same?

I like to program Drums, Percs and FXs on OT and do the Melodic stuff with DN and jamming between them. The OT is the Master clock and you can change the tracks is each machine the way you want

#11

No, didn’t try it yet.
But my goal would be similar. I like to mute/unmute Digitone tracks from the OT Arranger

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#12

If you want to control mutes with Mixer midi tracks mute buttons you’d need a midi processor. Should work nicely.

If it toggles mute/unmute it can be annoying to set up. OT doesn’t send the same consecutive midi CC twice, so you need to use 2 or more different values to send them.

Did you make some tests sending CC94 with OT?

#13

Not so good on the MIDI side of things but i want to know more. Not at home to try this now but tonight il do it!

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#14

here we go. as easy as that. thanks!

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#15

Would be amazing if this could be done with one OT track, cause then I could use the other 4 tracks for the A4. Can’t figure out how I could do this. With two tracks it works perfectly indeed

#16

Not sure if it is that easy. OT doesn’t send the same consecutive midi messages. It is sent once.

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#17

So 0 is MUTE and 1-127 UNMUTE ?
Or it toggles with any CC 94 value ?

#18

0 is unmute and 1-127 mute

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Best way to mute Digitone from Octatrack using MIDI (solved)
#19

So IIRC @vespr made a track with several CC 94 = 0 to mute and another one with CC94 = 1 to unmute?

#20

Ok thanks! It would be a nightmare otherwise.
@unbesbai, you told me it was toggling!
So it would work for you with 2 midi tracks?