Digitone drum sequencing

When i attempt to program a simple drum loop one one track with sounds from the sound pool all the triggers play on one voice and it cuts off the sounds. Been digging through the manual and the digitone trying to figure out how to get the track to use more than one voice at a time and I’m struggling. Can anyone show me the simple step I know I’ve missed to get a drum loop on one track without cut off sounds?

It’s in the voice allocation settings (the button that looks like lips :lips:). I’ve been getting good results assigning 3 voices for drums since that’s the most you can trigger at once on a single track (previous trig slid forward and next trig slid back)

I’ve tried that and it didn’t do it, do I need to make longer triggers so the sequencer knows to use a new voice?

Trig length shouldn’t matter if I remember correctly. Try it with parameter locks to see if you are still getting monophonic behavior.

They need to be different notes. If you use octave shift on your drum sounds you can get this to work, by making (for example) C-4 on one sound be the same octave as C-5 on another. If you try to trigger or layer two successive C-5 notes they’ll cut each other off.

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You mean putting plocks as well the sound locks?

Boom thank you!

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No probs! It’s an annoying limitation. I don’t even know if it’s considered a bug… @Ess can you advise?

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Not a bug at all! This is how the voice allocation works. Typically, you don’t want to trigger a new voice on the same note, you would get that typical ‘ugly’ phasing sound which is common for digital synths that reset the phase on trigger (as is default, and often preferred on an FM synth), or just do not have any drifting in the oscillators.

We have some ideas about this … Can’t make any promises as per usual, but I’m aware of this short coming and hope to be able to add some option to make sound locking in this manner better.

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Thanks for the explanation!

It’d be great if that could be disabled even just for sound locks… currently the workaround isn’t too inconvenient though, so I can live with it.

I’m not sure if its a short coming or not when I think about this issue functionally. Hopefully I’m wrong here, but the shortcoming is that this feature is not documented at all in the user manual.

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I was hoping I could sequence all my drums via the multimap channel but this same-note-cutoff feature is putting a damper on things … If two notes come in at the same time, sometimes I hear both, sometimes not. If the notes are slightly offset in time, the cutoff doesn’t happen (maybe Elektron made a compromise in an update), but the offset is audible when sequenced via DN MIDI track + loopback.

Personally I don’t see a use for the feature. It seems kinda like saving the user from something that happens only due to user error, like not understanding MIDI echo and local off.

Turns out I was wrong and the drums are actually always cutting each other off when NOTE INC is set to 0, but since different voices are used on each new note the tails are heard and can overlap. Drums with any kind of sustain, like an open hihat or kick-bass behave like one big choke group.

I don’t see how you’re meant to use MULTI MAP as a drum kit with this limitation. With NOTE INC set to 0 you can only play one sound at a time and with it set to 1 you have to take whatever pitch you get, or else spend time modifying the pitch of individual sounds.

All I think Elektron needs to do is add a Pitch Keytrack setting to Sound Setup. With pitch keytracking disabled, each sound in the multi map could have a different note without it affecting the pitch and thus could be played simultaneously.

To have control over the pitch, a Transpose or master Detune setting in Sound Setup would also be necessary. This would be useful in any case.

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Have you tried turning off REUSE in the voice menu? They added the ability to turn it off in a recent(ish) update.

Yeah, REUSE has no effect. I had it off already. Notes cut each other off, but still cycle through the voices. When one light goes on another goes out, if that makes sense.