Digitakt Scenes Hack using External Sequencer

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#22

Just did a quick test, haven’t played around with it for quite some time so…
The way it works on my Analog Keys is, when you sequence from another sequencer, you can place trigless trigs and lock parameters. While you hold such a trigless trig, the p-lock will be held temporarily, as long as you press down the trig button.
The p-locks will only be played when you press down on a trig, they’re ignored for incoming midi notes.

Let’s say I have a trigless trig that locks cutoff to 42 and another one that locks cutoff to 98.
As long as I press the trig with cutoff=42, the cutoff will be locked at 42. Of course I can build whole sets with 64 ‘scenes’ per track, p-locking multiple parameters.

You mean p-locks on a midi track on the Octatrack?

#23

So it works exactly the same way for the AK. This is great. I think I remember someone tried the same thing in DN and it worked.
Now to find out if OT can do it, and how the hacked scenes respond with its own scenes. AR too. I have an OT but haven’t been able to get it to receive midi notes on the audio tracks. OT always takes me like half a day to figure out stuff.

(Seems like FILL and Trigless both work the same except Fills are activated when pressing the page button out of rec mode, which is sort of cool but I don’t find much use for it. But Trigless are quicker to lay down so I think I’ll use those moving forward.)

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#24

I forgot to test on my OT…will do when I’m back.

I think there’s a very high chance that it works on A4/AK, AR, DT and DN, given the similarities those machines share in terms of how sequencing is implemented.

OT is sort of in the middle between the silver boxes and the Analogs and scenes would be a potential conflict…we’ll see. :slight_smile:

#25

Perhaps this is something that you should be asking of other users of this unannounced (presumably private beta) firmware?

#26

Btw, it seems not to work on the Octatrack.
On audio and midi tracks, when I press down on a trigless trig or trigless lock, the sound gets cut off.

For midi tracks, I checked with a midi monitor. I could see that the midi stream just stops when I press a trigless trig/trigless lock.

So no luck on OT.

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#27

Hey Y’all. I seem to be having trouble with the scenes on the MIDI tracks. I set up the trigs exactly like the audio ones. Set to “Fill”. Then I touch the trig and move the parameters. They light up to show that they are being affected, but, no changes happen on my device. It’s weird because when i move the actually encoders things happen. And when i set up a traditional plocked change it is affected. But for some reason this trick isn’t working for my MIDI tracks. I’ve tried red trigs and yellow “trigless” trigs. Also i’m trying to affect my M:C which is acting as my sequencer for the DT. But like i said the encoders still work when i turn them and the traditional plocked trigs work. I don’t know what i’m doing wrong!

#28

So in this case the MC is the sequencer and also the target of the cc scenes from digitakt?

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#30

That is correct

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#31

I’m curious if it has anything to do with the fact that the sequencer is also the recipient of the midi scenes. Do you have another device that can be at the end of the chain instead of MC? I’ve got sequencer > Digitakt > Typhon and that works.

If it still doesn’t work with a setup like this then we know it’s something else.

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#32

I ran into this behavior on the DN a few weeks ago.

I was trying to sequence it with the OT, and was hoping that the sound would change along with the pattern as it played, but nothing would happen until you held a trigless trig, where the sound would temporarily change while you held the trig down.

I didn’t try doing it across multiple channels/tracks though.

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#33

I also had this thought. I’ve got a Korg NTS-1 that i can test it on when i get back to my studio

Model:samples as an accompaniment to a digitakt?
#34

So I finally gave this a real go and had some fun with it. I’ve got the Digitakt sequencing itself. The full jam is at the end.

Thanks again for sharing this

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#35

This is super cool. Didn’t know this was possible, excited to give this a spin later. Really opens up SP404 like effects on the Digitakt; kind of also reminds me of the Beat FX on the Novation Circuit Rhythm, which take a bit less setup but are also less flexible. @Doug I think I’ve seen you rocking one of those too yah?

Thanks for sharing this @Sponge!

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#36

Yeah, its definitely more flexible than the Rhythm. But there are some that I don’t think are possible on the Digitakt like digitize or beat repeats. I don’t think I’ve got my mind fully wrapped around doing this enough to try to integrate it yet but I’m thinking if I sent MIDI the Digitakt from the MIDI thru to the Digitone and routed that MIDI track to the Rhythm, I could set up my own extra grid FX scenes that matched up with the stuff I had on the Digitakt, which itself would be going through the Rhythm’s fx.

It can get nutty.

One bit of best practices is that if you’ve got an empty track, use that one to actually play the fx so you don’t have to worry about accidentally deleting your settings.

Also, if you’ve got a 32 step pattern but your tracks are 64 steps, you can put your scenes on steps on the second 2 pages. That way you can do things like set up an alternate sequence that’s set to fill.

#37

How did I not know about this trick yet? This is completely mind blowing! Thank you guys for figuring this out, I’ll immediately start to experiment with this. Looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

Edit: it is a lot of fun.

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Trigless trigs behavior when sequencing elektrons externaly