Ok - Getting back to this, as i’ve used my Digitakt for 2 weeks.
My review so far is 9 of 10.
It’s an amazing digital instrument, and I’m creating new things I never thought I would get into.
I made an ambient track for example, and had a blast making it. While the track is nothing special, it showed me a new level of “quiet” sound design. I don’t know what it is about the Digitakt, but I can hear all these little things in the signal (in a good way), and it’s cool to work at that level of detail.
Regarding Overbridge, I’ve had a good experience with it. It was actually great for a while, but I’ve had several disconnects while working. I wish I could narrow it down to make a bug report, but it seems to only happen when I’m working for a while (40min+). For example, last night I was dragging and dropping sounds to a pad, and did that about 20 times, and it crashed.
When the reliability is higher, Overbridge will be very high value for me, and I’m really happy it exists.
Now, the device itself is an infatuation. I friggin’ love making beats on this thing, and exploring sound design! I woke up early this morning just to play with sequencing the pitch of a LFO, added lock trigs to mess with parameters, re-sampled, and assigned multiple trigs to pick different start points of the sample. And of course you can keep going, and that’s the best part about the flexibility, you can can keep going. I wasn’t into samplers before, but this has opened my eyes to sampling as legitimate sound design.
Did you catch that I woke up early before going to work? Yeah, it’s that special to me.
Why only a 9 out of 10?
Is it because it’s mono?
Nope, I find that for percussion that’s great, and you can use 2 channels (or 8 if you want to be ridiculous) to model sounds. Yes - re-sampling takes it back to mono, but for me it just really has not been an issue.
Is it lack of effects?
No, while I would like to have more, I can shape sounds really effectively (well bandpass and notch filter, yes please!)
Is it because it doesn’t have a battery?
Nope, I’m perfectly fine moving from place to place with a power supply, and it’s very portable IMO.
Is it because it doesn’t have song mode?
Not directly, but that’s closer.
Is it because it doesn’t feel finished?
Yes.
As much as I love this thing, it just feels like it was on a story arc to be a historical product, and cut ever so slightly short. The team that worked on this should be damn proud. It’s such a unique, and cool device. For those smitten with it, you know how attached you can get with it.
My hope (ok - plea!) is that Elektron come back to the Digitakt and give it some attention, as it’s so close to being the best thing I’ve ever purchased. I’m one of those people who would never spend this much on a drum machine, and it’s utility has really impressed me and won me over.
9 of 10 for now.
10 of 10 if we can get a few more updates.
Best regards,
Gino