I’m programming drums for a cover of Ritual Spirit and there are a lot patterns involved — more than 8 different patterns. Also, as the song progresses, it makes sense to logically split banks for the song — first half of the song with verses and the second part with the break and the ending.
I’ve been thinking of changing banks manually and it’s definitely possible, but in the middle of the song there’s a small break with just 4 steps. I was thinking maybe I could switch to a new pattern, which is only 4 steps long and on the last trig of this short pattern I switch bank and select first pattern in it. Is this possible? If yes, where should I look for information about it?
Also, I would appreciate any suggestions on how do you handle songs with more than 8 patterns?
I think you could make a pattern chain that has your patterns in succession including the 4 step pattern and the next ones on the new bank and it should just play right through them…
Nope, you’d have to redo it after power cycle…
You can perhaps copy all your patterns in line in order in another bank, to make it easier to rebuild the chain…
I’ll play around a bit more. Thanks a lot for your help!
Is there a roadmap to what’s coming to Digitakt? Is Elektron going to add more features? For example, so midi channels can modulate the sample channels without the midi patch-cable.
Thanks!
I’ve been looking into the patch notes and they seem a bit… Um… Underwhelming. I appreciate they fixing bugs, but it’s been how much? 9 months since release and they still patching things?
The Octatrack was released years ago, and it still gets updates
This is a good thing! Software-heavy Instruments will always have idiosyncrasies … so I am very happy that Elektron’s instruments are still being updated after years.
(My background is working in networking, on the very bones and veins of the whole internet, on gear that costs more than houses, and outages occur regularly. Most outages there are caused by software acting in unexpected ways. I think the world’s militaries have fairly reliable software, but they spend utterly inconceivable amounts of money on software development and testing!)
Well, they added conditional trigs to the Octatrack in a software update just last year. That was a nice bone if you’re into bones lol (as a lamb I am vegetarian)
I’ve been doing this from MIDI tracks in place of a proper song mode and for longer patterns. You need to patch MIDI out to MIDI in though. This has been known to cause freezing, but I’ve isolated this issue to
MIDI clock loop: you can’t have both MIDI clock receive and send enabled at the same time
MIDI note loop: you can’t set a MIDI track to the DT’s MIDI auto channel
Just by avoiding those two I haven’t had a single freeze in months.
I reserve track MIDI H for this purpose, with channel 9, and set that same channel in Prog Chg In Ch in MIDI setup. Then I place a trig on the first step with the Prog to the pattern I want to move after the current one. By using trig conditions you can go crazy with it, but it’s definitely a hassle. Additionally, when setting up the trigs while the DT is stopped, you need to disable Prog Ch Receive, otherwise the DT will switch the pattern right away.
