Digitone Tips and Tricks

Change globally, and and change tracks after?

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Is there a trick or tip for copying to a non-active pattern? Only just started using Digitone’s own sequencer again and remembered that this drives me crazy. Especially if using tempo-per-pattern. Last thing you want to do is swap to a new one, have your tempo go haywire, then do the paste. There’s a solution, right?

You mean copying a pattern to a non active pattern?
You can press PTN + the pattern you want to copy from + REC (copy) and then PTN + the pattern you want to copy to + STOP (paste) for a few seconds.
That way everything happens while staying in the same pattern.

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THANKS!!! I was sure there must be a way. The manual seemed to say there wasn’t and I just accepted it like the quitter I am!

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Happy to help!

Sent a suggested manual tweak over - might help other old timers in the future. :wink:

Only found recently by accident…
holding pattern then selecting track is a short cut to purple pattern mutes,
so you can access both mute modes without having to enter mute mode at all

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Wait what? That changes everything!
edit: oh my god this is great. No more ‘Shift+mute, Shift+mute, left go of shift, shift+mute again’ to get Pattern Mutes

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Neat idea! I might actually use this one as I don’t generally use all 4 tracks anyway (I use a lot of unison so I often eat up 8 voices with just 2-3 tracks). Not sure if you mentioned it but if I were to do it with 2 tracks, I would use track layering on the voice allocation page so that one track triggers the other (knob H) rather than copying the sound to the 2nd track, that way I can modulate the sound in one place rather than two.

If you dont want to sacrifice a track, another way to get longer basslines at a nice rhythmic resolution is to use the arp as a ‘sequencer within a sequencer.’ Program the arp in the rhythm you want, and lay down longer notes at the start of your phrases - at 1/8 or 1/4 track speed this means note lengths of like 16-32 to get a 1 bar sequence, placing trigs on the 1 and 9, or even just the 1.

Takes some programming experimentation in the arp menu page, but generally setting repeats and note length both at 1/16 works well. Downside of this is that the bassline will be fairly rhythmically repetite as arp is not p-lockable - to get around this, you could combine it with sound locking and microtiming non-arped bass plucks.

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I found this out by accident too! It’s not something I use often, but it’s very handy when setting up a chain of patterns. If you try to pattern-mute and unmute too quickly it’ll open the sound pool, so watch out for that. It doesn’t happen when doublepressing func+track.

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TLDR: using pitch bend midi messages as a very flexible pattern transposer

Here is a neat trick I like to use on the DN. I like to use the DN as a stand-alone device with midi loopback. All my patches are programmed to respond to aftertouch, breath control and mod wheel messages, which I treat kind of like perfomance knobs or scenes on the OT (see one of my above posts in this thread for details). The synth tracks are programmed to not respond to note messages, as I only want the midi tracks to modulate them and keep things relatively simple.
Synth track 1-3 on the DN are all listening to the same midi channel (11), which I control with midi track 1 on the DN. Synth track 4 handles all drum duties, therefore it doesn’t respond to midi messages on channel 11.

Changing parameters this way (AT, BC, MW) is quite flexible and the changes in sound between patterns are maintained, but the knob positions of the new pattern don’t correspond to the last values sent from the previous pattern. Not a such a big deal, but as I often just transpose a new pattern up or down a few semitones I started thinking of a workaround.

The pitchbend knob had been staring into my face this whole time to solve this issue and it offers quite some additional flexibility in comparison to the normal pattern transposition (e.g. not transposing drums). So I configured the patches on synth tracks 1-3 to transpose up 8 semitones in the setup menu. This way I can send midi messages in increments of 16 to transpose through the semitones (which is the value the midi knob jumps to if you press and turn it, very handy).

Now pitch bend values can be p-locked to transpose all melodic synths tracks mid-pattern. Or conditional locks can be used to only transpose once in a while or by holding the fill button. Really long varitions can be created by using a track scale of 1/8 for the transposing midi track. You can really squeeze a lot out of a single pattern this way, especially when fiddling with the parameters on the synth tracks and using FUNC+NO pattern reload.

Using the fill-conditional also “mutes” the trigs (as long as you don’t push the fill button), so you can create a “bank” of transposition trigs which can be activated with the FUNC+YES trig preview. Trig previews are also a nice way to jump right into a new “scene” by locking the corresponding AT, BC and MW values to it (or different LFO settings if you want to get even crazier).

P-locking all values on step one back to zero with a 1st condition is also a nice way to reset the values when changing to a new pattern. So many nice possibilities and so much fun to be had with this machine. If only the arp would swing, the DN would be perfect imho.

Sorry for the long post, maybe someone finds this overly complicated trick useful :smiley:

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That sounds crazy. I didn’t know this kind of stuff could be done.

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Can we get this thread going again? Midi loopback is a great one, especially since the bugs were squished last update.

Today I was eager to go wild and manually sweep the full range of the modulators to find some harsh and dirty spots, but the syn1 parameters are locked to intervals and the offset is too fine. Solution: point a square LFO to pitch A+B2, speed 0. Now the depth knob is your modulator pitch. Lots of very nasty sounds to be had here!

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How have you found MIDI loopback? I tried it the other day sending the MIDI LFO to a parameter on a synth and it didn’t actually work.

Did you go into the midi setup menu and configure on which midi channel the synth track receives note/cc messages?

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Indeed.

I can’t test it at the moment, but I think you also have to put a trig on the midi track for it to start sending data, if I remember correctly.

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wow thanks! I see myself with the digitone keys already :smiley:

Ah. That may be it. I’ll try it out. Thanks!

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