Oh man, thanks so much (to both of you).
Right now I pretty much only use a Digitakt, an iPhone, and a little pocket-sized Boss multitrack to record.
After a bit of trial and error my (current) workflow for this kind of music is:
- Listen to the tunes I want to sample for the project (these tracks were for a weekly beat battle, so there was certain material I had to use and rules I had to follow)
- Load the tunes into an app called “Djay Pro” on my iPhone to check the BPMs, and either pitch them up or timestretch them to get everything to a tempo that plays nice together.
- Make a new project on the DT, set my BPM, and sample a bunch of snippets of the songs I’m working with.
- Next, I put a piece of the sampled song on a track and start rearranging it on a single track using different start times on different trigs. I usually make a 64 step pattern. I then add other bits on different tracks in that pattern to build the song up, drums, bass lines, sound effects, vocals, etc
- Once I have a pattern I like, I often copy it to another pattern and tweak it a little or a lot to make another section of the song.
- Once I have several patterns I like (A1,A2,A3,A4, etc), I start experimenting with transitioning between the patterns to see what flows together and what doesn’t, and I tweak as necessary.
- After that, I basically record the song live, switching to different patterns and tweaking stuff on the fly.
That’s it in a nutshell.