Breakdown of DT#37 Thank You Headroom (November 17th 2019)
I’m making one of my tracks from scratch and explaining my process in this video. Thanks for the requests, everyone!
00:00 - Intro and demo
01:33 - Seting up reverb, delay and compressor
03:58 - Setting up the drums on track 1 (Overdrive, bit reduction, LFO)
06:48 - Making a simple drum pattern
09:27 - neat trick: boosting kicks with a HP filter
11:00 - Using LFO to make drums more snappy
11:57 - Making the drums retrigger when pressing the Fill button
13:48 - making the hihats
16:23 - Copying track 1 to track 3 and adding delay (and completing the drum pattern)
20:50 - Copying track 1 to track 4 and changing sample
23:09 - Setting up the bass on track 5
26:58 - Making the bassline
29:00 - Changing note length at random
30:55 - Setting up the pad on track 6
33:10 - Using lock trigs to change play direction on the pad
35:58 - Weird delay trick
38:34 - When to use the fill button
40:39 - SAVE YOUR PROJECT
Digitone Sketch #9 Travel Light (November 18th 2019)
I’ve been playing Death Stranding lately and have been really inspired by it. It’s an odd game with incredible atmosphere, and I’m really enjoying it so far 
I figured out a workaround for doing 3/4 time signature on the Digitakt and Digitone. The trick is to make 3 trigs play in the space of 4 trigs by using microtiming, then leaving the 4th trig blank. Took a bit of getting used to, but it’s a tiny bit of work that lets me page between steps as easy as if I was using a 4/4 time signature.
All audio is coming from the Digitone, with a multiband compressor added in post.
Digitakt & Digitone #14 One Week Later (November 26th 2019)
Thank you for subscribing, all 3000 of you! I really appreciate the support and kind words I’ve gotten since I started uploading. Thanks for sticking around
It’s been a week since I last uploaded a track, hence the title. This time I used a plugin called Drumaxx, a physical modeling drum synth as the sound source for my drums, and applied my usual too-much-compression and distortion, then sampled it onto the Digitakt. I think the drum sounds it makes can be a bit too synthy, but they worked really well when adding a bit of FX.
I’ve also been watching Adventure Time and I really love the songs there. The melody in the middle part of this track was inspired by this one particular song with Marceline and the Ice King.
All audio is coming from the Digitakt and Digitone, with a multiband compressor and a tube amp simulator thing added in post.
Digitakt Sketch #38 It’s Gone Now (November 29th 2019)
I figured out a nice way to combine the Digitakt’s sequencer with FL Studio’s piano roll. The piano part of this track was first drawn in the piano roll, then live-recorded onto the Digitakt. This lets me use the super fast workflow of the piano roll, but tie everything into the Digitakt so that all the patterns and sequences are all coming from one place.
I also experimented with a new way of putting together a beat on 1 track. As usual, I pick a drum loop I made earlier and set start points to “slice” it up, but lately I’ve been using a hp filter to boost the kicks. It can become a bit cumbersome when I want the cutoff and resonance to be at different values for kicks and snares. To make this easier, I duplicated the entire track several times, then dedicated each new track to 1 part of the sample (1 track for kick, 1 for snare, 1 for hats). I set the filter and start point and everything to taste, then p-locked those values to a trig. From here I could just copy that trig into track 1 and not worry about accidentally deleting a carefully p-locked trig, because the “master” version of it was already set on a different track. After I was done making the beat, I could use those dedicated tracks for other things. I was planning on adding another layer of drums, but decided to keep things simple so the piano part could take center stage.
The Digitakt is sequencing a VST called Akoustik Piano, and a free VST called OB-Xd I use for the bass.
Thanks for listening!
