Hope everyone is doing well. Been slightly less active lately, but with good reason. Have been working hard on a lot of new material for upcoming shows and releases this year. Hopefully I can be a bit more active again when I’ve a bit of down time! Kinda miss the nauts vibe
Last Thursday I performed live in Berlin for the first time at ://about blank. Really amazing club with a great inclusive vibe. I recorded the entire 1,5 hour set and you can now check it out on Soundcloud:
Setup used: Sound sources
Digitakt II x2
Digitone II
Syntakt
This current setup is the result of many years of work, research, and practising. With the release of DT II and DN II it feels like it can finally do what I dreamed about ever since the first Digitakt was released. The new mixer + send FX setup has been working really well and it offers a lot still to explore and experiment with.
Musically it’s basically a completely new set and at a tempo that I really enjoy playing at. Always loved higher paced techno. Not the super hard stuff, but the uptempo energetic and groovy kind. Glad that there’s a place for that in clubs at the moment.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the set! And let me know if you have any questions about a specific part of the setup.
Congrats, that’s a really prestigious club you’ve played, cool that the people there are nice!
I was also wondering why 2x DT (II) and what you mean by the new mixing pages that enable you to do what you’ve dreamed of. Or did I read that wrong and the „new mixer + send effects setup“ was referring to other gear?
Also: do you sequence ST and DN from the DTs or do you run their internal sequencers?
Curious how the Fader fox is used with this setup. Does each Elektron get one vertical column, does each row do the same thing on each Elektron…etc?
Also , does it have assignments per track or are they ‘global’ in a sense?
One final question, what made you drop the DB4 to go with the Elare 6?
All boxes are basically treated as a standalone groove box. The idea for second Digitakt II started out as using it mainly for extra drum layers like hi hats , rides, kicks , and some interesting rhythmic stuff that I can throw in for extra energy / flavor. But when working on that it grew into a bit more than that. But the first DTIi has more complex grooves currently for sure.
Each groove is one pattern and I control every aspect and create an arrangement live. I also morph grooves from different boxes together etc.
Yeah the vibe in there was pretty incredible. Everybody was super relaxed.
So, one reason why this setup is what I dreamed of with the addition of the version II of both Digitakt and Digitone is that it has enabled me to use each of these groove boxes truly as self contained instruments. I’ve been able to use extensive layering of sounds and elements to create more complex grooves and so on. It’s a bit difficult to explain in text (also pretty tired right now )
Each Elektron uses its own sequencer.
Faderfox is mapped to modulation matrices (modulation wheel and breath control) of grouped tracks for DT II , DN II and ST. Basically macro controls to have quick access to subtle changes to create tension, add energy, create breaks and drops etc.
Since I only use 1 pattern grooves this gives me nice control over multiple elements at once.
Faderfox answer above. I’ll plan making a little video about it and how I use it.
The reason I now finally moved away from the db4 is really mainly because of the new Digitakt and tone and how much more I can get out of each of them. I didn’t really need the input matrix and looper combination anymore (which was the most important thing about it to me). Still an incredible function so the db4 will stay with me in the studio for maybe a different (modular) setup. The Elara 6 is all analog, sounds beautiful, has sends and a master insert, beautiful filters and analog processing etc. And the 4 band EQ is the thing I really wanted for a long time. The 2 mids especially help me level up the sound balance out of the digi boxes even more. And it helps me blend several grooves together more nicely.
@DaveMech What made you choose the elara.6 instead of the xone 92mk2, which looks almost identical?
Is there still so much room for improvement, or are there indispensable features?
Very nice set, by the way. Thanks for sharing!
as promised, im listening to it right now!
you told me youre feeling the 148 bpm, Im glad you keep your rather dark yet round sound there. Im tired of squarewavey kicks + sidechained noise (sidechained noise is nice though! )
I can also tell it works fine on big speakers, so quality wise what Ive been hearing throughout the years I hope berlin people had fun.
I still miss that nasty perkons kick though, maybe sample it for me and use it.
Im 7 minutes in, me likey!
keep that stuff coming!
oh, second track…i know that one! no single smartphone, something was done right.
The 92 is also very nice. Couple of things that made me choose the Elara: parametric EQ on the return channels. IMHO better frequency band distribution of the mid bells and hi shelve for the channels. The slopes of the hi and low shelves in combination with the chose mid frequencies are very musical to my ears and fit perfectly with what I do and like to hear.
The analog processing strips are really cool on the Elara. (I have a deep dive video on this mixer on my channel by the way where go into this quite deeply).
There’s also the aux send on the analog processing strips which makes for some very beautiful feedback loop trickery.
Last but not least: the master insert, really also the feel, the knobs residence, fader curve….
All in all it might look the same (same designer, Andy Rigby jones ) but it’s a really different mixer all in all.
Haha yeah no smartphone videos allowed thanks for listening mate. Quite a variety of kicks and layered kicks in that set. Still need to sample some nice Perkons kicks into the DT
Yeap that’s indeed that groove ! Updated obviously and quite a bit faster. 3rd of May I perform again but will have to play a bit slower so it’ll be changed yet again a bit
so this is a recording with a zoom or something, right?
from minute 11 on my heart skipped a beat, something is/seems to be resonating
techno sometimes makes you crazy when youre always attentive for unwanted noise
Zoom essential h4 yeah. Nothing to worry about, I mixed the mic capture of the crowd and club sound in to capture the vibe a bit and make it feel like the club recording it is. Bit like the early dj sets from late 90’s early 00’s. Nothing is resonating all the way through or anything
as Im listening and reading the workflow of your live setup:
do you quantize/exclude certain intervals on a hardware basis?
I mean Ive been through quite some boxes and improvising “melodic”/repetitive more or less lead synth lets you most of the time skip certain intervals/certain steps in certain scales.
minor second, triton, octave, perfect fourth, perfect fifth and youre good for decades of techno without going happy by accident. just thinking out loud as Im wondering…
Not really no. 90% of the time I go by what I (want to) hear in my head, experiment, use dissonance and create and tune stuff around that and that sort of thing. Every so often I’ll lock to a scale to experiment a bit or very rarely I’ll use music theory as a tool to solve a “problem”. Not sure if this answers your question though ;).
Note though that I’m not playing/improvising these “melodic” lines live. For most of them that would be quite impossible to do as there’s a lot of precise modulation, conditional and parameter locking going on most tof the time. I do control how they built , how they morph into something else, tension, etc etc
yeye, you did.
I was just wondering how intuitive it is for you to dial in a ,-8,+6, +7, +11 with an encoder. I could imagine its very counter intuitive as a trained musician.
oh, that makes my question redundant.
dialing through chromatic scales while making synth lines sounds like youre composing a childrens song live and you have to work around that somehow, I was wondering how you do that.
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thanks for listening mate. Quite a variety of kicks and layered kicks in that set. Still need to sample some nice Perkons kicks into the DT