Best practises: Combining patterns into a live set project?

Hi Nauts,

I’m curious to hear everyone’s workflows on creating live set projects on the Digitakt.

I’m trying to avoid having to open up more than one project while on stage. The problem is that I’ve created tracks in a bunch of different projects with different samples.

One method I thought about was to take all the samples from a particular pattern I’ve made and then make a sample chain out of them so I can load that as one sample in the “live set” project. Then I could just try to re-sequence the pattern from the sample chain in this project. This way I would easily be able to fit all the different patterns of my tracks and all their different samples in one live set project,

Sanity check… Am I over thinking this? What does everyone do in these situations?

Try Elk Herd, then you can import/export patterns (and samples) from one project to another. So, you could create a new liveset project with your favourite patterns from all your other projects.

(Make sure you backup your projects and samples / sounds first!)

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I heard about this. Seems a very useful tool.

Definitely will help with moving patterns. I guess I am more worried about the samples being over the dreaded 128 mark.

You can copy/paste patterns:

For a live set project, a common strategy is 1 bank per song. @MilesKvndra has a cool pattern flow idea between main patterns and transitions (ton of other great tutorials too):

https://www.youtube.com/c/MilesKvndra/videos

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Oh I didn’t you know we could do this directly on the machine. Need to check this out on the DT

You can copy and paste patterns between projects on the Digitakt. But unless you’ve got the same samples in the same slots it won’t really work. So you’ve got to handle that part too.

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Elk-Herd really is quite amazing. It’s very clever in that it will only copy the samples that your patterns need to work, so it helps economize your sample count.

The one issue with it that can arise is if you like to use the LFO to change sample slots (great for round-robins or other glitchy techniques) it won’t copy/load them in such a way that supports this way of working.

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Try to distill your tracks down to thier rudimentary components, consolodate them into a couple of loop files and create a fresh project. Add in the live stuff you want to do. Makes tracks easily remixable in the future

Alternatively you could just buy an octatrack and resample your beats into it, for seamless transitions while you load different projects.

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Hey @GeonTone, thanks for the shout out - appreciate that! And agree to @scarpolish, I would also not change projects during a live set because that will cause a pause and really kills flow and vibe. For bringing all your samples/patterns into one project I would also just copy it across projects and then make sure to have the sample slots assigned to the new slots. One strategy would be to bring all the samples over, make notes on which sample was assigned to which track and then assign them new in the project. Bit of a hassle but then you have it all sorted. And yeah 1 song per bank worls great, as I mostly use only about 6 patterns per song I recently also fit in 2 songs per bank. This still leaves me with 4 empty patterns that I can use as transition patterns between songs.

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Hi,

Really the best is just to use Elk Herd app - it will move all patterns with required samples, you can additionally easily replace pattern sequence when you will change your mind during building your set. Another important point is how easily you can manage samples in banks for your set - no worries about duplicates and not needed samples.
This app is handling full backup as well.
Well I should shortly say that this app kills Elektron Transfer with so many features.
The dev mzero offer it for free.
After you will be happy with the app on his page you can find an option to donate him.
Cheers

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Thank you guys for the tips. Seems like Elk Herd is the way forward. Will try it

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