Digitakt : record trigs to MIDI notes from USB?

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

Hi everyone,

sorry the rather silly question, but is there any way to records trigs to MIDI notes from USB?

I would like to further use the pattern I’ve programmed in my DAW.

Obviously, I do not mean the MIDI tracks, but the audio ones, if that’s the correct way of putting it.

Thanks in advance!

#2

if an external midi source is set to transmit on the Device’s unique Auto Channel it should act as though the selected track was played on the device, irrespective of the track channel midi assignment which would usually be different to the auto channel - this is precisely what Auto Channel is there for

you will need to have MIDI arrive on the USB port too - using OB may make this more of an issue

#3

@avantronica: I guess you’ve misunderstood the question: the OP wants to get the MIDI notes from an audio track back … :wink:

It’s not possible to output the sequencer content of audio tracks as MIDI. But there is a workaround to get at least the MIDI notes back:

1 Like
#4

Probably, ‘further’ slants it the other way round

#5

That’s certainly good enough, thank you guys. Not sure why trig conditions don’t qualify for recording, as they’re merely events themselves. I’ll take a look, appreciate your help!

#6

The trig conditions aren’t events themselves, but they produce events. Think of a generative pattern. Each loop will produce a different output. So while you could record theoretically many loops it’s still not the same.

It’s more about not being technically able to map the complete content of an audio track (with all the possible dynamics like trig conditions, lfos etc.pp.) back and forth into/from a plain (up to)4-bar MIDI pattern.

Additionally you would need to embed CCs for all the dynamic changes to the sounds in the MIDI output (by lfos) and there are features which couldn’t be mapped to CCs at all, but would need some kind of embedded sysex (like sound locks).

So either you would get a really crowded and complicated MIDI output which may even overload a standard DIN MIDI connection or you get an output that doesn’t sound anywhere the same when you play it back to the device (depending on the features used, of course).

The general request (give me MIDI from the audio tracks) looks simple, but technically it isn’t. That’s also the reason why the internal audio tracks sequencer of the Elektron devices isn’t MIDI based at all. And that’s also the reason why you can do things with the internal sequencer you cannot do when controlling the device by MIDI.

So if you want to go seemlessly back and forth between a DAW and the internal sequencer I would suggest to use only MIDI tracks (with a MIDI loopback setup when using the internal sequencer) and ignore the audio tracks. But I guess you will quickly find that you miss out some of the most interesting features of the Elektron device(s) which are only accessible via the audio tracks …

#7

Hey man,

thanks for elaborating, much appreciated. Just to clarify, the idea is the following:

  1. program some patterns
  2. export those patterns to MIDI clips
  3. use those MIDI clips to trigger Atlas
  4. build and export drums kits with Atlas ( which is a breeze )
  5. load those kits back into Digitakt

Hence I guess the copy Audio to MIDI track workaround should work just fine in theory. Probably requires some additional transposing to map the notes correctly, but that’s to be seen.

Another way to accomplish this could be to

  • print individual audio tracks
  • audio to MIDI in DAW
  • merge the events on different tracks into one clip
  1. as outline above
    5…

Might be slightly cumbersome but…hey. Maybe it’s a shit idea all together haha.
I’ma give it a shot…

Cheers!