Digitakt noob questions

mitya33 · 2023-05-01T12:17:49.244Z

Hey everyone,

I recently got a Digitakt and I’ve been using it intensively and learning a lot in the last few weeks. What a machine! I’ve done a lot of reading, and a lot of my early questions have been answered, however there’s still a few things I don’t get and I’d be grateful if anyone could help me.

Is “reload ptn” the correct way to revert to saved pattern/param locks after making live edits during playback? How and when does this temporary pattern get saved, and can I always trust that it will go back to how things were right before I hit play and started live-tweaking?
As I understand it, sounds are samples with param locks applied. Does this mean the 64 factory sounds are all derived from the 400 samples? I don’t really get the whole samples/sounds thing, or why sounds has its own, quite major, encoder, which I find I hardly ever touch.
How come the screen always says “Untitled”, even when I’m working on a project that’s saved with a name?
I’m finding that I can never make a sample loop, i.e. when I set a loop point within the waveform. What do I have to do to make this take effect?
Some weird things happen when I choose “FWD L” or “REV L” within “Src” but I don’t fully understand what they do. Could someone clarify?
“Src” > sample direction - why does this sometimes say “Play” even though “Play” itself is not a sample direction option when cycling through them? If I set direction to “Fwd”, then play, it reverts to “Play”.
Is there a tried-and-tested method of achieving a beat-repeat/beat-slice effect while a long sample plays? In fact now that I type this, I imagine it’s something like LFO to sample amp, harshly cutting in and out - that about right?
It seems that the delay config is not something that can be changed per trig; if I hold a trig and go to this screen, I can’t change any values. I can do this only for the track as a whole. Is that correct?
Occasionally, when I press play, playback starts from within the middle of a page (or from a page other than the first - I’m not sure). But I can never reliable reproduce this behaviour; is this a bug, or a feature I haven’t got a handle on?

Thank you so much for any help!

digimatt · 2023-05-01T12:47:17.742Z

1, There are two types of save, the temp save(func+yes) which can be reverted back to with func+no but will be lost if the project is not saved or is reloaded. Then there is project save which is permenent and can be reverted to by reloading pattern from project . It is also worth noting that if you add samples to your +drive they need a whole project save, saving pattern to project will not save changes to the ram list.
2 Sample are raw ingredients, Sounds are samples seasoned to your needs ready to be used again elsewhere, Sound pool(when populated with Sounds) enables Sounds to be inserted in tracks as trigs without taking on the current track parameters
3 The untitled is referring to the pattern names rather than the project.
4 You need to set play direction to forward or reverse+ loop.
5 and 6 Not too sure what you mean
7 not sure but maybe with lfo use.
8 The delay is per pattern so you can only lock the amount unfortunately.
9 If you press play while a pattern is playing it will behave like pause, pressing play again will carry on from that point. Pressing stop once will take it back to the start, double pressing stop will also cut any left over tails if you have an inf trig length for instance.

deadinside · 2023-05-01T12:58:15.317Z

To help with 4, 5 and 6, it might be useful to press SRC twice to see the waveform and how the different parameters affect playback.

Whenever something isn’t quite doing what I expect, viewing the waveform while it’s playing usually clarifies.

mitya33 · 2023-05-01T14:15:39.552Z

Thank you, both! Tremendously helpful.

To clarify:

I was basically just asking what the sample direction “FWD L” and “REV L” do . It sounds like they’re needed to make the loop parameter do something?
If you look at the sample direction param in the Src screen while playing, it doesn’t say “FWD”, for example, even if you’ve set it to that; it says “PLAY”. But “PLAY” itself is not a selectable option within the sample direction param, so I’m just wondering what this means.

As for sounds, cool, so does this mean if I select a sample, apply a load of mangling effects to it (change its start/end, filter, whatever), then save it as a sound, that saved sound has my changes baked into it so I can easily use it in another project? Is that the general sounds vs. samples idea you were referring to?

Further questions (if I may!)

Am I right that trig conditions are the key to getting something to happen every N times a pattern plays, e.g. if my pattern is 4 bars but I want something to happen only every 8th bar?
Could anyone suggest which cable I’d need to live-sample into the Digitakt from a Zoom H1N recorder? Again, I realise this is a super basic question but I’m new to this.

Really appreciate the help!

deadinside · 2023-05-01T15:39:47.620Z

11.3.2 PLAY

Play Mode sets the play mode of the sample. It controls how the sample will be played back when it is trigged.
The different modes are:

• REVERSE The sample will be played back in reverse once every time it is trigged.

• REVERSE LOOP The sample will loop continuously in reverse between Loop Position and Length. How long it will loop for is set with the LEN parameter on the TRIG page. This time is also constrained by the AMP page envelope parameters HLD and DEC.

• FORWARD LOOP The sample starts at the STRT position and will loop continuously between Loop Position and Length. How long it will loop for is set with the LEN parameter on the TRIG page. This time is also constrained by the AMP page envelope parameters HLD and DEC.

• FORWARD The sample will be played back once every time it is trigged.

PLAY is the name of the parameter itself, not the value

digimatt · 2023-05-01T17:03:03.433Z

Thats pretty much it, FWDL starts from the start point and resets at the length, you can move the loop position if you want something different on the first pass but the loop point will follow the start parameter unless you move it. In reverse its the same but the length becomes the start point.
I think you need to press or turn the encoder to see the direction of play.
Sounds are basically presets, only downside is they cant take reverb and delay master parameters with them so if they rely on them for the core sound they might sound a bit odd in another setup.
Sound pool is something I really should use more, being able to put all those choice Sounds on any track without affecting the existing trigs or losing the stored parameters can be very useful.
A 1/2 trig condition would in that situation give you a 1 trig in 8 bars result.

mitya33 · 2023-05-03T10:43:55.540Z

Thank you, everyone, really appreciate the help and advice.