600 bpm!

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

This morning I woke up with the thought “hmmm if we now have 2x track scaling… can we use the sequencer as an oscillator?”

Well check this out! I only had a few minutes to play with it, but I made this pattern of kicks (image below), set my BPM to 300 with a 2x scale (600 BPM), and used the retrig at 1/80 on one of the notes. In theory this would produce bass/sub-bass tones, with the retrig producing a higher tone.

It worked! While this sequence is playing, if you play with the sample tuning, you get some really interesting changes.

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I know this is too fast for drums, but it’s great for making bass synth wobbles and other sonic filth. Plus since this is the DT, you can resample it.

Edit: Adding a clip of what this pattern sounds like, and I’m just manually tweaking the tune knob.

Best regards,

Gino

21 Likes
#2

How is this better then looping forward with a short length?

#3

That’s a very good point.

The big difference I see is P-locks, as you have the whole sequencer to mess with. But I haven’t explored it much.

3 Likes
#4

very cool, I applaud your explorative mind! :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#5

It may not be great to melodies and tunes but for making unique glitchy things it could be fun

On the tr8 I often run it full speed / slowest it’ll go and engage scooper , it’ll make weird noises too.
Add delay , reverb , mangle a few knobs and it might surprise people as it glitches the fx etc all together.

#6

I’m not at my DT now, but when I get home I want to try slicing this with a square wave LFO (on samp tune or samp volume). That will add another “note” since the LFO can do some low-fi FM/RM.

If that works (and is audible) I want to record some automation of the LFO rate to hear the syncing change.

Chances are that it will be a mess of dissonance :blush: but I find that there’s sometimes a sweet spot in that dissonance that you’ve never heard before.

1 Like
#7

You know, I bet there’s a way to invent your own waveforms with your method here.

I could be way off, but I think in theory- you could have a noise sample trigger once and then put trigless trigs adjusting the volume to alter the shape.

I THINK! if you play it fast enough that should make a waveform?

2 Likes
#8

Yes - I think this will work (kind of). The BPM is cutting everything into small slices, but they are much longer than a single cycle, so you should be able to inject different tones/sounds. I would be surprised if a sound lock will work at this pace, and if so my hat is off to Elektron :grin:

If I’m doing my math right, 600 bpm comes out to 40hz for normal trigs, and with 1/80 retrigs it goes up to 200hz. I have no idea if that’s what really going on, but you can definitely hear notes forming.

As you pointed out, you can loop samples to play this fast no problem. It should sound the same if you take a kick and loop it at 40hz.

I also want to say that I apologize to any Elektron engineers (if they read this and are shaking their heads). I’m fully aware this is NOT the intended use of scale by track.

2 Likes
#9

I put a small vocal clip through this, just playing around… this is all 1/48 retrigs and manually turning the tune and samp start knobs.

12 Likes
#10

AWESOME! You mentalist mastermind…

1 Like
#11

And in therory if you duplicate the track and sound and copy it to the next track, change the sound of the second track, ans switch it to high pass…then by using ctrl all on the filter you morph between the 2 “OSCILATORS” smoothly like a wavetable…maybe…

3 Likes
#12

This sounds sick! Resample away!

1 Like
#13

nice stress testing work :slight_smile:

#14

I think they would be delighted to see that users are finding ways of using their creation which wasn’t nescessarily intended. I would be.

7 Likes
#15

One more…

This is a single audio track from the DT doing a resonant sweep using the technique I described above.

It’s straight out of the DT mains, using it’s internal effects.

Not bad for a drum computer :laughing: (I used 2 tracks for this one)

11 Likes
#17

It’s like it’s saying “Oowwwwwww, please stop… stop it, stop that…”
Beautiful.

1 Like
#18

OK just discovered something significant worth sharing…

Funny how I didn’t even know how to use this stuff Digitakt 1.11 : Bug reports and that limit turned out to help me :slight_smile:

As I added more and more tracks, I found that indeed the DT eventually got angry with me, and I hit a few exception errors. But, by limiting the tracks to 2 trigs, I have lots of head room again.

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So if anyone out there is also exploring this, one way to get more bandwidth (and stability) is to use a short pattern length.

Best regards,

Gino

4 Likes
#19

lol, you managed to crash it? Nice stress testing! I need to try this trick out on the OT MK2. IIRC it’s the only elektron box without a plock limit so will be interesting so see whether or not it balks at this sort of tomfoolery.

#20

Maybe like this… :grin:

I do need to stop, but it’s too fun!

9 Likes
#21

“Drum Computer” confirmed

That is creepy stuff LOL