I feel like this belongs here, despite the absence of Digitone.
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The sounds here seem violent and aggressive to me, in a great way. Cool SOPHIE type sounds from the DN.
Your idea of violent and aggressive may differ. 
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How would you guys compare the digitone to the A4 in terms of violence? I am intrigued of both synths but wondering which one will have better tools to make harsh screaming sounds and atmospheres to support my digitakt.
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I’ve gone back and forth between both, but have pretty much settled on the A4 for the grotty stuff.
The things that I think set the A4 above the Digitone are:
- The more complex modulation routings.
- Feedback oscillators.
- Dedicated white noise and sub osc.
- Four pairs of analogue filters.
- The ability to use neighbour tracks to stack up into a filter bank.
- Performance macros.
I liked the Digitone for harsh stuff, but I never really got on with the master drive and always ran out of modulation.
My new (old) A4 will be here next week and it’ll go straight into service as a harsh noise workhorse, along with my Lyra and Polivoks.
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Its hard to find good aggressive demonstrations of A4. Do you have anything to share? I have seen Jeannes videos, but at this point I am sure she can make a toaster sound violent.
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I sold my A4 for a Digitone, it is much more direct and simple, and smaller I can go to play with only a small case. I am really happy with the Digitone, I use an EHX operation overlord stereo distortion for more grit.
I do prefer the sounds I got out of the Digitone than those I made with the A4, I’ll post some tracks really soon.
I use digitakt for drums and Amen Breaks, and Digitone for bass and synths and everything that is not rythm.
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Don’t really have much, most of the stuff I recorded when I had an A4 last time has been lost.
Give me a week though and I’m sure I’ll be firing off some grot with my new one.
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I think the A4 is better for that metallic swrils, stabs, when i do digitone, it ends up ofen glassy or bell tone, like, if you have recipies for stabby metal percussive sounds on the digitone, post your knowledge.
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I feed mine into the Elektron Analog Heat and use fuzz distortion and lots of modulation for great results!
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I think ill see if I can catch a stereo distortion some day. While the analog heat would be great, its a bit expensive if all I am looking for is added distortion.
I am also planning to get an octatrack used at some point for stereo sampling etc. And hope I can use its effects to some extent.
I have been using digitakt and syntakt now together and best results have been sampling into digitakt and then further mangling the sound to get more violent results. A distortion effect would make the process more straight forward
I don’t own A4 (I have Digitone and Syntakt) but DN can goes very far from DX7 glassy/bell tones and sounds very dirty, unstable and noisy.
Here is a very short sound with standalone DN noisy pattern. I made this to do an A/B comparison with AH+FX bypass and then on so the first 20 seconds is DN without processing.
To get agressive and violent tones from Digitone, mess up with the ratio offsets, high feedback can help because it adds a lot of noise and audio rate modulations with lfos can also create metallic/noisy/dirty textures.
But it’s sure that in comparison to Syntakt for example, it takes more work to get away from the initial clean glassy sound when on Syntakt, Raw and DVCO machines will start dirty and agressive very quickly by just turning 2 knobs (but at the end, it offers less complex sound design programming).
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I figured out what I really want after doing some experiments this morning. While the digitone is great for sound design I find it somewhat limiting in terms of the style / warmth of sounds I want to go for. This can be improved by having effects pedals.
I have a digitone at home but am unsure if I like the sound design process on this device. However I created a base sound -> sampled it into the digitakt and was able to introduce more LFOs, further reverb and distortion to make it more twisted, however the digitakt lacks stereo sampling which I would love to create width on top of my beats.
Therefore I think what I would need on top of my digitone and digitakt is an octatrack at some point so I can stereo sample VSTs and Digitone there and create atmospheres to layer on top of my Digitakt (drum machine). This would be the perfect setup for me.
The only thing I am unsure about is that do I generally like the sound design process of the digitone and wonder if I would like A4 better. I’ll give it more time.
I’m not sure the sound design experience is much better on the A4. In many ways it’s less immediate than the Digitone (things like filter envelope being on a different page to the cutoff and resonance) and it definitely requires a bit more of an intentional approach than the Digitone, which tends to reward a bit of the old muck about and see what happens.
I think the thing that ended up annoying me about the Digitone was the ways that the FM engine had been limited. I don’t mean this as a criticism of the architecture, I think it’s very clever, but it lacks things like more complex envelopes (plus each operator not having its own envelope), fixed frequency operators and some of the deeper controls that you get on the old FM sytnhs from the 80s, and I found myself rubbing up against those limitations quite often. But if your issue with the sound design is just that you’re not fully into the FM part of it, maybe have a look at the A4, but don’t expect the quick and easy sort of experience you get on a lot of analogue synths, it definitely isn’t that.
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Thank you for the replies. I might even move sound designing entirely to Ableton and sample VST synths into digitakt & octatrack if the Digitone doesnt click with me.
I moved to Elektron workflow since I love making music without a computer and the sequencer clicked with me quickly. I hate writing songs in a DAW and come from a black/death metal background in music making. Good thing about the syntakt has been immediate good sounds and no need for a computer to design sounds, but I can just load my samplers with a lot of stuff to explore and mangle.
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I do prefer the sound design of the Digitone more than the A4, I traded my A4 for a Digitone with no regret. It is more straight forward, raw and sounds fatter for me (maybe because I was an A4 mk1), but I also use a stereo distortion with it (EHX operation overlord, I bought it for drums on the digitakt but hated it on the digitakt and for percussive sounds).
With the Digitone I spend more time playing and making music, with the A4 I was sound designing all the time, it was fun but not productive at all.
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I own each, DN can get far more nasty than the A4 me thinks.
A4 is more “lush” and “meaty” than the DN, but the DN can go from beutiful and fragile to digital harshness and nasty with one or 2 parameters tweeked…
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I downloaded a trial of ableton and confirmed I hate working in a DAW these days. However I recorded one sound from there and one sound from the Digitone and did this beat purely on the Digitakt.
I think it might be that no matter what synth I have for sound design I enjoy far more just samplemangling them to the point it doesn’t sound like the original at all. Syntakt, Digitone or A4 I think would be good options each to create a bassline/pads etc. for my songs. Good thing is also that if I record into the digitakt, then I can add a second layer of oscillators, tuning, filters, overdrive etc. goodness.
Here is the short beat I made to test this thing out:
Without wanting to derail the thread away from the DN, you might want to check this out…
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First time I saw this post I wanted to make something really dark and hard with my digitone. Maybe not enough dark, but very hard for moments, here’s the result of this post. I’ve made a live presentation last week of this work. All made with the 4 tracks of digitone and a bunch of vocal samples. Nothing more. Thanks to this post. Hope you like it.
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