Forgive what is going to seem a very basic question. I’m trying to plan my setup without yet having the tools to test these things out, so I’m at a conceptual level. Been watching videos but I’m still a bit unclear.
As I understand it, Overbridge allows you to export Digitakt’s audio tracks to a DAW, per track.
But if the Digitakt is also controlling external synths over MIDI, what would be the process of getting those synths’ audio into the DAW - is that done via Overbridge too (so audio goes from the synth back into the Digitakt) or would each synth need its own audio out into the laptop?
If the latter, this presumably implies a mixer. So the mixer’s audio out goes to laptop. But would that send individual tracks, or just a single, glued-together audio signal?
Only the synth that will be in the inputs of the Digitakt, the L and R will show up in Overbridge. You can control more with midi but you’ll have to capture them with an audio interface.
Thank you. So any external synths not sending audio to Digitakt will have to make their own way to the laptop, via an interface. And does this interface send separated audio tracks to my DAW, or one glued-together audio track? (Presumably the former.)
You can do either, it depends how you want to route it. If you have individual outs from your different synths and your audio interface can handle them then you can have the individual outs. A couple of words of caution though:
Your DT only has one Midi out, so if you want to sequence multiple instruments with it you’ll need a way to get the midi around all the synths. If your synths have midi thru you can daisy chain them, otherwise you’d need a splitter of some sorts.
Latency is something you might need to consider in this setup. If you sequence everything from the DT via OB, and route some audio through OB and others through your interface, the latency compensation applied by OB will only work for the audio routed through OB. I appreciate this is probably a bit confusing when dealing with things abstractly, but trust me when I say this can be a real headache. I’d try and keep anything related to OB as a self contained system - I.e. if it’s clocked by OB find a way to get it back in to your computer via OB. If you can’t and you need another way to get it into the computer then just use the computer to sequence/clock it.
You can trick OB into routing two mono signals into your DAW via a single stereo input, you just need a way to take the L and R signals respectively and make them mono in the DAW - quite easy to do, but this approach might limit what else you can do with the signal inside the DT (e…g send FX).
Ah thank you, this is really interesting. Especially the point re: Digitakt having only one MIDI out; in my total naiivity, I hadn’t even though of this; in my fairy world my Digitakt can MIDI control all sorts of external instruments (I think I thought this because it has 8 MIDI tracks). So into my life arrives the concept of a “splitter”, as you call it. Presumably this is much like an audio interface but for MIDI i.e. takes a single MIDI in (from the DT) and separates that out to multiple outs (to multiple synths). Or so I imagine!
Yep, various solutions exist so it’s worth honing in on exactly what it is you want to do.
A piece of general advice I’d give is to not go too big in one go. Integrating additional stuff one piece at a time has generally been a lot more fun and a lot less frustrating for me. Sometimes even one extra piece of gear can rip a setup from something that works and is fun/productive into a mess of issues that proves to be a total distraction from making music. Maybe just me though, others have much bigger setups than me and seem to get by, so there is always a way to get it done, it’s just a case of patience, time and money.
You can control more with midi but you’ll have to capture them with an audio interface.