Digitakt and Soleman foot controller

First of all a big hi!
New to the forum and new to the world of Elektron and elctro music gear :slight_smile:
Got a two piece combo doing some garagy rock stuff and want to spice up our tunes with some electro vibes. The Digitakt fills the gap just perfectly, cause not too hard to learn the tweaks and that little thing gets you really creative while you really can use it as a live instrument.

Now to my question about live performance: I googled a lot if the Digitakt is footswitch controllable to give it signals to start/stop or switch patterns, while playing guitar.
There were a few comments in the forum, that it works with the SOLEMAN midi foot controller. So I ordered the SOLEMAN and guess what… I have no clue how this is going to work, since all that electro gear is really new territory for me…

Can any one help me out with a short description to make this work?

Thanks a lot and cheers, Nils

Physical connection:

Connect a working MIDI cable from one of the MIDI Out ports of the Soleman to the MIDI In port of the DT.

In the DT’s SETTINGS > MIDI CONFIG menus:

  • set PORT CONFIG > INPUT FROM to “MIDI”;
  • activate CLOCK RECEIVE in the SYNC sub-menu.

On the Soleman, use Panel Mode to customize the device. As far as I can tell, you will need to

  • set the On and Off states of footswitches 1, 2, and 3 to send the System Real-Time messages Start, Stop, and Continue however you prefer to do so;
  • set footswitch 4 to act as a Tap Tempo input;
  • enable MIDI clock output.

It seems like you need to use the software editor to perform the customization.

Get started with this before you move onto the next task.

In the DT’s SETTINGS > MIDI CONFIG menu:

  • activate PROG CH RECEIVE in the SYNC sub-menu;
  • make a note of the PROG CHG IN CH number in the CHANNELS sub-menu.

On the Soleman, you need to think about how you want to use it. You can use Scene, List, or Panel mode in different ways. You will use MIDI Program Change messages to select the pattern on the DT. Program Change values 0 to 127 correspond to patterns A01 to H16 on the DT.

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Peter, thanks a lot for reply and now I got an idea where to start. I try to figure something out according to your instruction and hopefully can report a success soon. That will be awesome! Thanks!!!

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