Digitakt, Overbridge, and REAPER

Elektron Software Overbridge
#1

Hi all !

The elements involved are : Digitakt, Overbridge, and REAPER (DOR)

There is an issue I’ve been facing for a week now and I haven’t found anything online that addresses this. My guess is that this is a DOR specific problem.

I managed to split each track of my song from Digitakt to Reaper. I did this by adding a VST track to Reaper. However, the tracks come in mono ( or rather its stereo characteristics disappear ). Reaper still indicates it as stereo (by not indicating it as mono).

For example, lets say Digitakt TRACK 1 gets plopped into TRACK 3 of Reaper. Fine. All good.
Reaper creates a dedicated track to Digitakt VST and then routes the separate Digitakt tracks to their dedicated Reaper tracks.

However, Digitakt TRACK 1 is a delay guitar sample that ping pongs left to right. If you listen to TRACK 3 of Reaper, that ping pong effect is gone. This happens to all tracks coming from Digitakt.

What is interesting is that the original Reaper VST track created does contain the ping pong effect AND all other stereo effects from DIGITAKT, but its all on one Reaper track.

Until I can get this sorted out, I’ve been recording my songs track by track ( the pre-Overbridge way! ) because I have a lot of stereo effects, especially percussive, that really benefit from the stereo. This is not the end of the world, but this was the only reason why I installed Overbridge so that my recording method would be less painstaking.

Anybody out there solved this in DOR ?

Sorry for the repetition in terms but I just wanted to make this post understandable.

#2

FX are send-only, this means all tracks are sent to the same FX path. In other words, you don’t have one FX chain per track. So it makes sense that you can’t record FX for each track through OB.

1 Like
Overbridge 2.0.19 Public Beta
#3

Thanks LyingDalai !

I think I understand now.

I guess I have to stick to my way of working (record track by track) to preserve FX per track or apply them in Reaper after tracks get moved from OB.

Cheers!

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#4

Hi, was there any solution for this? It’s absolutely ridiculous to me that we can’t record stereo w/ overbridge in Reaper…

When you click on the IO routing for the Digitakt FX chain in reaper it even shows each individual track and the routing that is done and it shows R and L for each track, unfortunately it is complete BS because the effect of the LFO on the AMP PAN completely disappear when I do so.

Why even bother to provide routing for L and R if it doesn’t actually pick anything post-LFO up?

Even when I play the track w/ just the Digitakt VST I can hear the stereo effects so why doesn’t it freakign properly route it to the receive channels???

Completely ridiculous, Elektron really needs to fix this and stop treating reaper like 2nd class citizen. Now i have to re-do all the LFO behavior in reaper… Come on guys this is crazy! That’s so much extra work. What’s even more crazy is I have visual evidence of this working at some point…

#5

It’s not just reaper the inputs are mono in all daws…
the only one of all the overbridge devices that can record stereo and the panning is the digitone…

You have to do the panning afterwards or record the stereo main to record the panning

#6

Hello,

I have a kind of workaround involving phase cancelling, which is not fantastic and a bit hacky but works !

First :

  • in digitakt routing menu route every track to main (8 audio tracks + send fx -> main, it is the default)
  • Still in digitakt routing menu, put the track as “post fader”
  • record everything with overbridge (so the main out, and the 8 mono tracks)

Now let’s do some phase cancelling :

  • In you daw, invert the phase of all the digitakt tracks except for the main track
  • Move the fader of the main track in order to find the sweet spot where you hear almost nothing but the fx send and Stereo Fx you produced.

The sum of these tracks is now a “stereo stuff only mix” (likelely without kick, snare, and the low part of the bass)
It is like doing the operation : main - (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8).
Render this and you will not only get the effect send (reverb and delay) but you also keep the stereo effect induced by LFO on phase etc. It is not perfect, but to process a snare or a kick, that is usually mono, it is enough

To finish, render your “phase-cancelled” mix, add again your 8 mono track on the top of it and you are good to go :slight_smile:

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#7

That is brilliant!

#8

Hahaha thank you.

Note that it requires more processing ofc if you have panned your tracks in digitakt.
However, If it just to process the kick, bass or add some shimmer on the high end,
it is very useful ;-).

One can see the separate tracks as “back-up” tracks