I’m fresh to the Digitakt and getting to know it slowly but surely. Like many people I find myself digging into the sequencer to create interesting loops, but during improv jams I tend to “lose my place” and have a hard time developing a track without losing trigs, assigning the wrong effects to the wrong track, etc.
Maybe I should immediately copy A1 into A9, tweak A1 to find another sweet spot, save to A2, copy A2 into A10, and so on, so that each iteration of the pattern is saved (in A9, A10, etc) without being played or altered in any way?
Also, do you tend to record your sessions or play just to play?
…never start creating with pattern 1…copy the pattern ur creating on/in to the next slot, whenever u reached a next level of progress/actual liking of where it’s at right now…
creating/jamming session is about to let loose…all sorts of final arrangement/how to play all this in any order mindset is another thing that only slows u down and happens later on anyways…
always think in “songs” per bank…keep always in mind, later on, u can copy/paste any pattern to any other slot/over another pattern and beyond all banks…
never narrow down too early…u got heaps of space…
whenever ur stumbeling over a nice combo of soundevolvement, mute all the rest and have a little resampling session moment…
Your basic suggestion of copying stuff to the row below/next makes sense. Thinking in terms of one bank one track is also good advice.
I’d say definitely record as you’ll forget stuff fast. Imo you don’t have to always record everything. I tend to record a little blueprint of the results of a session in the end, like going through some patterns in an order that could work, mute/unmute tracks, fade stuff in and out and play a bit with knobs. Also record if you’re messing around with stuff that’s hard to replicate later on like wild effects or heavy tweaking, maybe there’s gold in there that you can later slice and use as loops.
I’m with @reeloy that your aspiration shouldn’t be to come up with the perfect order of patterns and tracks. That will only slow down your momentum. But it’s important to come back to banks/patterns at a later point and clean up things so that patterns are in a logical row and tracks in a good place. It’s also good to have some basic structure for yourself that you can internalize, like what sound usually is on which track. Or like variation of pattern1 is in pattern9 etc. You can also setup template projects with some settings like track lengths, samples/sounds, FX settings etc. which will make you work faster.
Have an audio recorder on standby on the computer. Sound forge, audacity or whatever. When you hear something you like hit record and jam for a while. Edit those jams into tracks later. It’s a fun way to work but also destructive as you can’t necessarily go back and adjust volumes etc but you can always do another jam.
Yes definitely once you have something you like then copy to another pattern. Sometimes I even put one in a different bank so I don’t accidentally break it. I mostly only use bank A otherwise I lose things.
Remember there’s lots of people on this forum who have incredibly fast fingers and will do everything live. Build ups, transitions break downs everything. They may even build whole songs with one pattern.
I am not that nimble or that skilled. I build songs over multiple patterns and use pattern chain to link them together. I don’t use song mode because I find pattern chain more convenient but again lots of people on this forum will use song mode really well.
There’s also loads of people who are quite happy to just make amazing 4 bar loops and never go beyond that.
Good thing is…digitakt works for all these approaches
I would recommend watching jonmakesbeats on YouTube. He uses an octatrak and it might not be your style of music but he shows his method of building songs really well. And he’s funny. And his output as JonWayne is great.
