Ambient/Drone with the DT?

Is the DT well suited for that ambient/drone style ? Which means longer samples and slow evolving LFO’S and envelopes. I know it reads “drum machine” but I was wondering about pushing boundaries. I’m not keen to go OT because it looks way too deep and it won’t be the center of my set up anyway. I must admit I like more immediate stuff, like the AH. I do mostly recordings. Any thoughts ?

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The DT is amazingly great with a longish sample (say a harp line or summat), multi trigs, then assign the LFO to sample start and chuck it a random waveform = instant random lovelyness…

Also the single-cycle waveforms allow for some mental drone possibilities, copying patterns and adjusting tuning across several tracks… you can’t (yet?) p-lock the reverb/delay parameters, but you can copy patterns and adjust effects for each, sounds cool when changing the delay time between patterns, nice transitions…

The reverb is purdy lush too, goes to infinity…

Oh, and the trigs all have probability conditions, so you can get all techy and work some pretty evolving seqs from 64 steps.

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Drones are easy. Use a low bpm and use the track scaling at 1/2 speed or less. Use single cycles or loop short bits place a few trigs then live record and mess with parameters, assign the lfo to something, add a loopback midi and use 8 more lfo’s.

The lfo will go really slow when used like this. Not sure if track scale affects this, most likely not. The lfo at 0.1 speed and 1 bpm is slow enough for me haha.

I just wish they sort out midi soon so the loopback will work. I’m getting loads of crashes using it. For now I’m sticking with 1 lfo and loads of p-locks, trigless trigs and live tweaking to create ambient like soundscape-y thingies.

This so called drum computer is pretty good at generative music, even when using 1 track.

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It is amazing where you can go with the DT once you say bye bye to Kick and Snare and start looking for droney sounds.
This box can do a lot of you sounds, one does not even think of, before creating them.
I have the OT and the DT and although the OT has some more technical possibilities it is amazing to listen to the DT.
What I liked about the DT is how fast one can get started. That is a big advantage compared to the OT.
Both are great but the DT is faster for me.
I whish it would not crash every now and then… :frowning:

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I have exactly the same feeling, DT is just so instant and very capable too!

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Thanks Joshua. Really inspiring track !

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Thank you all. Your comments are helpful.

The OT is a beast but usually overkill for me personally. To be honest one of the few things I really miss the most from the OT is track scaling. It just enables the lazy person in me to put my chord progression on one track at a slow speed.

Would be sweet to have it on it on the DT. Till then I will make do with scaling the whole pattern down and using conditional trigs. I’m having a lot of (immediate) fun and to me thats very important.

Thank you! It was an experiment that ended up sounding not too bad and it really changes all the time. When midi is stable we can use a loopback and use 8 more lfo’s on the audio tracks. So many possibilities then!

Drone-like ambient Digitakt through Analog Heat https://soundcloud.com/aheadinclouds/flight

Original melodic content sampled via Nord Wave - this is one track on the Digitakt

None-on-the-floor! :slight_smile:

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Thanks Earsmack, I enjoyed your track. DT is really tempting.

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This is really beautiful! Such a dense sound.

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another way to do cool drones it to set the decay on INF in the Amp menu. then you can trig a note using the keyboard in chromatic mode and here you go! while the note (or the notes) is playing you can still tweak al the filters, lfo, delay, etc…

https://soundcloud.com/jgilardini-music/digitakt-drones

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My only concern would be that the envelopes aren’t super long, but you can kinda fake long envelopes with one shot LFOs too.

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Could you please explain what you mean a little more about short envelopes?

Not to say they’re short, but coming from the modular world I’m used to having extra long EGs, which are great for slow, evolving sounds. I just did a test with the filter EG and with full attack and decay the envelope completed its cycle in about 20 seconds. I have EGs in my modular that will be 30 seconds or longer for just a single stage.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, you could do longer EG-like modulation with the LFOs in trig/oneshot mode

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Out if interest, which EGs are these? Using the DT for long-form evolving patterns would be great, but my various semi-modular devices could benefit from some extended textural help on occasion too.

By max do you mean before inf when attack and decay are at 127?

thought of sharing this here… I made this drone/ambient track only with Digitakt

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