IDM / Glitch tips

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

Hi guys,

I’m testing Digitakt and I’m really excited about this little thing. However, since a lot of production process lives in preparation I barely could find any good tips and tricks on how to build glitchy / noisy rhythms. I’m a big fan of Board of Canada, Plaid, early Aphex Twin and early Autechre and would love to build some nice glitch ridden, but melodic stuff.

I figured a lot of the glitch / IDM type thing is in LFO modulating samples / loop start, etc. But coming from eurorack, Digitakt LFO is confusing AF. I have a few interesting items in my gear like cassette player and reel-to-reel player, which I use a lot in the production — I would love to use it for sampling as well as an effect source.

I would really appreciate any tips & tricks you could throw me. How to get started, what to look into, how to sample, what to sample, stuff like this. I don’t expect an extensive list of know-how but rather something to get my brain going.

Thanks,
Nikita

8 Likes
"IDM in box"
#2

You can get some glitchy feeling stuff if you use retrigs. Try high number of retrigs over a really short retrig time.

Lfo on playback type will also yeld some glitchiness.

6 Likes
#3

if you control all on sample start point, just twist it up and then back really quick you can get some strange happenings especially if you are using looping play back

2 Likes
#4

Hmm, where to begin. Well, I’d probably start by creating and/or gathering up a bunch of material derived from a combination of:

  1. atmospherics, including film samples and field recordings; look for interesting bits, like a reverb reflection or foot steps or something that could be used to punctuate a change up.
  2. granular soft synth processed noise and rhythmic odds and ends, chopped, pitched and time stretched into bite size pieces within your favorite audio editor
  3. a few clean synth lines or stabs to balance out the racket a bit

I’d be running really hot drum loops into that tape machine and then recording and chopping them apart in your audio editor and then loading them onto the Digitakt for additional abuse. The character imparted by the tape has potential to sound way more interesting than LFO modulation. That should give you some interesting raw material and then it’s just up to you to go to work with the detailed programming.

How are you with drum programming? Are you learning or pretty comfortable with being able to step program breaks, dnb, etc?

Here’s a glitchy track I did 15 years ago, no loop point modulation or LFOs in use here. :wink: DSI Evolver, various intermittent click noises, some white noise and somewhat more intricate drum programming.

22 Likes
#6
  • Retrigger
  • Looping samples and playing around with loops points
  • Use LFO on sample slot (this gets wild quickly)
  • Propability triggers
  • Using the FILL trigger and then hammering away on Fill for a more organic variation on probability trigs
4 Likes
#7

Don’t forget the bitcrusher :wink:
Lfo or plocks on amp env decay

4 Likes
#8

Yes! The sound of gated drums. :heart_eyes_cat:

4 Likes
#9

Thanks a lot for the great tips. I’m gradually getting into the Digitakt and sampling, so hopefully will be able to come up with something.
TBH, I’m usually pretty straightforward with drums, I enjoy pretty simple stuff with nice acoustic feel. But, this is mostly coming from the fact I learned acoustic drums (poorly) and my kit was pretty limited to pretty unsophisticated patterns and fills. But I’m really fascinated with drum programming on Digitakt. The sequencer capabilities, conditional trigs and LFO is amazing shit. I enjoy patching quite a bit, so even though I have a lot to learn about programming drums, I’m very excited about it. IT’s my cup of tea for sure.

About the track: That’s an awesome piece of IDM! Really, mate! I’ve listened to the rest of the suff you’ve produced and it sounds great. Great job!

1 Like
#10

Thank you for the advice, I’ll be looking into this for the next few weeks.

#11

I’ll check this out today, thank you!

#12

Precisely the drums I’ve always wanted to get, but never really understood how. Thanks for sharing your process!

One thing I’m kinda on the fence about are drum loops. For inexplainable reasons I’m very uncomfortable having loop samples on my Digitakt and always stick with one shots. Will I still be able to achieve similar results without loops or are they pretty much a must in IDM?

1 Like
#13

You may not have realized that most of the drums in that track were the amen break, yeah? I brutalized the amen break and specifically chose to cut it up in a way that didn’t sound jungle. I wouldn’t necessarily write off loops, you can get pretty extreme with them if you wish. That said, this was a series of one shots and I never use loops in final productions.

1 Like
#14

IMHO, the influences you mentioned are all rhythm masters and I would say that is key more so than process or esthetic. I’d probably make that a primary focus over audio processing. I think you’ll get more mileage from that but it may take time.

#15

1:07 / 1:13 / 1:14-15 /
Sounds great. not donne such sounds in any Elektron box so far.
where was it donne ?

1 Like
#16

The best tip that I have(I use ar for this) is to trig condition a lot of hits for the drums. I also have a track that will use trig conditions and have the sample slot plocked to different samples.

#17

Sequenced in Logic. Create and load up the samples and I’d think you’d be able to replicate this sort of thing on a DT or OT. This was all one shots of processed drums and it isn’t using a bunch of VST trickery. You’d have to get into microtiming.

2 Likes
#18

A combo of conditional retrigs (many retrigs :slight_smile: ), lfo on sample choice, amp decay, bitcrusher gets you quickly in these territories. But they were all mentioned before…
BOC, early Ae and Aphex had more repetetive beats compared to later… Glitchy but loop like.
The crazy Aphex stuff was then mostly about slicing break beats, while Ae using more synthesized, digital sounds. They used a Nord rack 1 for drums for quite a period (around lp5) and the machinedrum and monomachine later on. All very synthie, digital, noisy.
So, a Nord drum delivers these sounds very well, you could midi sequence it with the DT. P-locking and lfo’ing program changes for changing the ND’s presets is awesome for that.
Best combo here midi retrigs, program/bank changes, conditional trigs. So… a shame the DT doesn’t offer midi retrigs, while a shame, the OT can’t p-lock program changes :no_mouth:

3 Likes
#19

resample your track and play it back at half speed / random sample start offsets , triggering at different points.
put a gap at the beginning of your samples and use that to change the timing of the sound being triggered.
it’ll sound in time the closer you get to the actual sample data.

try making a track out of one sample , looping small bits to make synths and noises.
have different elements using delay and reverb , left/right pan , eq to keep things separate in the mix.

hit record and randomly hit a keyboard/triggers , close your eyes and twist knobs while recording the trigs.
slow it down , speed it up , play it backwards , down sample , etc etc.

try to include a melody , though i may be a little odd in preferring tracks with melody rather than glitchy random bytes that sound like a spectrum game loading on cassette. I’m a big fan of early autechre and the more melodic aphex.

plaid are more into off kilter arpeggios which sound nice too.

5 Likes
#20

Thanks a lot for your great advices, guys. I have to do a lot of work before I will actually be comfortable with Digitakt, but I’ve tried a few things from your suggestions and will continue learning. So far, I mostly keep getting ambient-ish / house-ish vibes from this thing every time I try something. But it’s a trial and error and I’ll keep trying.

I really appreciate your advices and if anything else comes to mind, let me know. I came up with nice effect on the vocals bu modulating LP frequency with LFO at a high rate and it turned the voice into sort of lo-fi distorted cassette effect. Awesome machine.
Here’s a piece of jam I did Yesterday: https://soundcloud.com/nikita-jermolajevs/sad-day-i-gave-up

3 Likes
#21

I mainly make glitch stuff so I have some tips I can share.

A really quick way to get some crazy glitch stuff going is to first get a load of glitchy one shot sounds in your pool.
Then select a sample on 1 track, I go for a sample number in the middle, maybe 64(doesn’t matter which one) and set up a load of triggers.
Put an lfo on the track, set it to sample select on the random LFO shape and adjust modulation.
Stick some p-locks for delay, reverb, bitcrush, ect… and repeats on some triggers.
Now you have instant glitch!

All the glitch drums on this track were done in this way:

Although when I recorded it I did a fair bit of live tweaking for more variation.

13 Likes