Digitone Keys without the keys

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#42

THANK YOU! One of the few constructive posts in here :slight_smile:
I don’t own a DK yet because buying it would only make sense to me when there’s a good chance that my modding could succeed.

But thanks to your description I think I have a good picture of the DK internals in my head now. If I got it right, the main PCB is reaching into the keyboard part for quite a bit for the connectivity to the knobs and buttons. Leaving it intact would waste a lot of space so that this isn’t a reasonable option. Except if I could fill the space with something else like a controller or my 1010music blackbox.

The custom housing with additional hardware to fill the space sounds funny and kinda tempting. I have to think about this carefully.

But the “pure” mod is pretty much dead for me. Solely the fact that I have to make a permanent and destructive change is a red line I don’t want to cross. I also don’t have the sufficient skills to fix a cut off PCB which I’m not familiar with. And even though I know people who could help me with that and even if we could make it work, there would be still too much unpredictable factors.

Thanks again for this professional answer and valuable insights!

#44

FYI: this is an Elektron employee; a hardware engineer, from the sound of the post. I’d take the words of caution and advice seriously (whatever you choose to do).

1 Like
#45

No, that is unfortunately not possible. The individual channels/tracks are mixed digitally before entering the analogue domain. The firmware knows what kind of Digitone version it lives in.

7 Likes
#46

Nice way to trash on the feedback you’ve gotten from others here because it wasn’t exactly what you wanted.

7 Likes
#47

You’re welcome! I’m a big fan of people modding stuff in general so I wouldn’t want to dissuade your idea without giving some inside information.
I believe @sezare56 has a most reasonable idea for modding if you want to use the keyboard space for something else than a keyboard. And then you would still be able to use the additional controls that the Digitone Keys offer.

5 Likes
#48

You can´t expect people to be happy if you plan to destroy an instrument just because you don´t like its size. There are tons of great music out there from people using the Digitakt or Digitone without Single-Outs. Skinnerbox for example use them as two-channel instruments with panning the tracks L and R. I never heard them saying “you can´t make music without singleouts”.

#51

Well it needs to be more robust, because the box is bigger. You need more code to fill the bigger box :wink:

#53

It’s pretty easy on A4 MKI, almost an invitation to do it.