Hi, the idea is fine but unnecessary. Elektron devices have what are called sound locks, so essentially you save a patch as a sound (example would be kick, snare, hi hat) and now that you have those “sounds” you add them to the sound pool. The sound pool is a separate holding tank as opposed to the “Track sound”, so while the original digitone is limited to the 4 synth tracks, the sounds which you save into the sound pool give you the ability to add more than one type of sound (ie kick, snare and hi hats) all to the same track.
In that way, you can use a single track and get a full drumline out of it. The downside is that for multitracking purposes, it would be summed together at the output, those drums would not be individual tracks so it really depends on how you intend to use the device.
It’s very convenient to be able to lock sounds and parameters, however the 4 tracks on the original DN is one of it’s limitations.
In my honest opinion, there is no contest here. MC is great and has a lot of great rhythmic qualities and a unique tone, but digitone is infinitely more musical and to compliment guitar I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
The audio over USB/audio interface capability and overbridge compatibility are also quite beneficial and the price is at an all time low right now. It’s just a better value for the money unless you have a specific reason that model cycles is interesting to you beyond the 6 tracks vs 4, because 4 tracks of polyphony with sound locks is extremely powerful.
The inverse situation of what’s described above, is if you need drums on 3 tracks for recording purposes, you could arrange multiple melodic elements on a single track using sound locks as well. Damn near a full melodic arrangement so some happy medium can probably be reached.
Previously, when a used digitone was three times the cost of a used MC, there was a bit more compromise one could make regarding the value proposition of one machine vs the other, but at this point I think you have to specifically want the MC sound and be prepared to accept it’s limitations.
The benefit of MC is more knobs per function, the plastic is pretty solid (although a metal digitone is so solid it would break your foot if it dropped onto it) but lots of people have abused MC pretty heavily in backpacks and such, and it seems fairly sturdy for a plastic device.
To be clear, I’ve only owned digitone but I do read and interact a bit on this forum and did consider an MC on several occasions so I feel like I can be somewhat objective.
In case you’re wondering, yes you can absolutely use the 4 polyphonic midi tracks on digitone to sequence patterns or trigger loops on your SP404mk2, so that’s also an option as you already figured out. Polyphonic midi tracks means that similar to how I explained the sound locks, you can trigger more than one SP404mk2 sound from a single DN midi track and even more than one from the same step.
Anyways, hope that helps a little. Good luck and welcome to the forum.
