Digitone x Ableton Clock

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

Hi everyone,

I’m keen to talk to a few people who have integrated the Digitone into their live performance setup with Ableton.

I’ve been using the Digitone for about a year peforming mainly ambient stuff and it’s been great.
I’m now at a point where I’m performing more uptempo electronica and what I’m finding is that I can’t seem to rely on the clock sync between Digitone and Ableton.

My live sets live in Ableton and I’m looking to trigger Midi out from Ableton into the Digitone.

My issues are that I can’t quite seem to get the latency right. I’ve tried using Digitone as the master clock but the issue is then that my set moves around quite a bit and those changes happen in Ableton.

What do your setups and settings look like?

Many thanks

#2

Latency issues are tough. Remember that you are actually dealing with two types of latency - the audio latency and potentially midi note latency as well. How you monitor will make a huge difference in audio latency. Are you using a mixer? Monitoring through a daw? Monitoring direct at a soundcard? Each scenario need different considerations. I myself use a hybrid setup and monitor through a daw. For this to work properly and still be flexible, allowing for additions of plugins which increase daw latency, I had to invest in an external midi clock. Works great, but was a nightmare to get the whole setup perfectly dialed in, particularly on the Ableton side of things.

#3

Have you tried turning on the metronome on the Digitone and Ableton and adjusted the sync latency? When we were doing live gigs with two Ableton PC’s we would adjust the latency before every gig to make sure it was tight. We changed setups often and at home if you change instruments and plugins you will have to adjust it. Check your Ableton sync drop down in preferences.

#4

You can get it nearly perfect, overbridge clock is tight,
run midi cable out from digitone to other gear and use digitone overbridge as clock

Midi out from ableton to digitone is not compensated you have to adjust the delay at the bottom of the channel only for midi out from ableton, don’t ever use it on audio.

If you use overbridge and digitone as master clock, and still have latency it’s audio latency.
I’ve got a heap of gear and sequencers drum machine etc perfect in sync,
Don’t waste money on external clock it’s a gimmick imo

Here’s my set up, the sequencers on my synths, the toraiz squid, tr8 all work in perfect sync with the elektron gear and clips playing in ableton

image
image1440×1081 155 KB

1 Like
#5

It seems to me that you are experiencing clock jitter instead of latency.
Latency is like a static offset which can be easily compensated and jitter is the tempo fluctuating so that in one bar some hits might be early and in the next bar they might be late.
I had this jitter with timing problems of ± 10 ms (which is huge!) and the solution which worked for me was to use an Expert Sleepers USAMO.
Good luck!

#6

The slowdown and speed up affect can also be caused by audio latency from how it’s being monitored