Hey all, I’m getting ready to go down the Digitakt 2 route shortly as the centerpiece for my live shows. I’ve been using the Octatrack for this since it came out, and while I don’t expect the same functionality as that, I was wondering if the new DT2 unit has any features people are finding useful for transitions between patterns? IE, similar to the transition trick on the OT.
Still going through the manual and all the old posts here, but thought I would ask to see if people have found any interesting ways of carrying the sound of one pattern over to the next as seamlessly as possible.
It takes more button presses in the moment than on Octatrack, but you can resample a pattern in stereo, then add it to a track set up to play and loop with decay set to INF. It’ll play in the next pattern, and the parameters can all be adjusted, until that track (I always use 16) is triggered/unmuted in the next pattern.
One of my favorite things to do with the DT 1 & 2. Really wish the OT operated this way. Would love to be able to sample everything, hit stop on the sequencer and just let it ride.
Are you able to sample directly to a machine on a track, or do you need to go into the sample pool every time and assign it to the track? Sorry, still getting to grips with the differences between the OT and DT.
Not quite directly, but the steps are: set up the sampler to desired length, hit Yes on the 1 (this needs to be in time), then it samples, you hit yes twice to save as a default name, then it asks if you want to add it to a track, press the track number it’s set up on.
…sounds possible in theory but is nowhere near to any fluid realtime approach like on the ot, not to mention the fact, this way, even if ur capable of hitting the perfect first bar exactly all the time, u’ll end up with heaps of long stereosamples piling up for no other reason than transitioning…
i’d say, keep it simple in overall logistics and have a “song” for each bank…arrange ur content in a way, that each first and each last pattern has an universal approach in a way that it can “connect” and chain up sonically in an uninterruptive way…
and does the dt2 not alow kit changes in some way nower days…?
meanwhile, always keep in mind, some sorts of hard contrast and short full stops can work great…don’t fear moments of silence…embrace some dramatic storytelling…
end of the day, ur not the next dj on the list, ur the live act…
Thanks but creating continuous flows of music for my sets is just something I enjoy doing. Making the whole performance itself one piece of art, and not just the constituent songs used in it. My original plan had been to record transition loops for each pattern ahead of time and use those to move pattern to pattern. But if there’s also a way to do it live on the fly, I’d like to explore those options too.
Not too worried about having a bunch of samples from each performance, I typically reset and reload all my live sets after each show anyway.
The new trig condition of “last” and “not last” is a bit of a game changer for transitions between patterns, for build-ups, breakdowns, etc.
Let’s say you want to have the kick drum drop out of the last two bars of the A section before the B section hits. Just put a “Not Last” condition on those kick hits, when you change patterns (assuming you do it early enough) the last two bars the kick will mute.
Another more powerful way to use this is to duplicate a track and its sequence onto another track and then mess with the parameters, for example you could up the resonance and record automation of a filter sweep. Now, on the final couple of bars of the A section, you could mute the original track and unmute the new track to automate a radical change in one of the sounds. Or you could use “Not Last” on all the whole of the original pattern, and “Last” on the new pattern, to automate that change like above. You can really go to town with this, applying it to multiple parts across multiple tracks. The 16 tracks of the DT2 give you a lot of flexibility to programme these sorts of variations, without having to remember to do them manually while performing.
If you want sounds to carry on into the next pattern, you can copy the track into the new pattern and use “First” trig condition in a similar way (the OG DT had this already but with the more limited track count it was less useful)
Then there’s the whole Perform Kit thing that allows you to tweak your sounds in the first pattern and have those tweaks carry across into the next pattern rather than having everything abruptly reset on pattern change. Haven’t fully got to grips with this yet, but it’s pretty powerful if for example you want to use Control All (which you can now select which tracks to apply it to) to low pass filter all your drum sounds and leave them that way as the next pattern starts, then after a couple of measures you could reset the kit and have the drums back to being full range.
You also have the Perform Preset mode which gives you a keyboard of presets to play that are not associated with the tracks on the pattern. You could manually live trigger sound fx, vocal stabs, risers, fallers, etc. that play across the pattern transition.
If you’re not sampling live, during playback, you can set the R.Start parameter on the Sampling screen to start sampling when you hit the play button, rather than needing to time hitting Yes on the one.
Obviously if you’re trying to sample while playback is happening, you need to do it the way you described.
Cheers everyone, these are all interesting ways of approaching this and what I was hoping people would share. I’m not quite ready to pull the trigger on the DT2 yet (it WILL happen), and all this gives me ideas for how to hit the ground running.
Excellent tips here, gonna explore these for sure.
I submitted a feature request for “half kits” which I think would be very useful for transitions.
Essentially this would be the ability to split any full kit into two 8-track kits, or to be able to choose between saving a full 16-track kit or an 8-track half-kit.
Even better would be the ability to choose any two kits to combine as a transition kit, which would replace tracks 1-8/9-16 of Kit A with the corresponding tracks of Kit B.
For now I will probably just do this manually with copy-paste of Presets and track sequencer data.
Sampling pattern live seems risky for transitions atm…
The tracks you recorded have to be muted if you want to play the recording you recorded manually. Or stop and play manually the track ?
Another way would be to quantize recording start with PLAY. Have to be in time too.
But at least the beginning is quantized.
And the recording is auto-normalized, so you need to be very close to 0db if you don’t want big level changes.
Feature request : a mode to quantize rec start at the beginning of the pattern, once you armed. Optional Auto-Normalize. With this a transition loop seems usable…
OT can do it. Btw I can’t see anything better on DT considering recording, appart from 128 steps defined length.
(OT can record quantized up to 8m28s, but you can’t define more than 64 steps recordings on 1 track)
