I really love the Digitakt. I have used it for a year now almost on a daily basis. My only problem is that I’m not able to finish songs on it. What would be the best route to take in order to get from nice beats and tunes to a finished “product” that you can call a song? Is a DAW in the end the only practical way to put together and finish stuff? Or would a Blackbox or an Octatrack be also a solution?
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Commenting here ‘cos I’m facing a similar issue at the moment, rather than because I have “solutions”.
My current perspective is that, in my case, it’s more a problem of willpower and definition-of-done. How do I know when I’m done? What “else” does the sketch/track tell me it needs? What do I want to say with these sounds and patterns?
With that in mind, I’ve decided to focus on reaching “done” fairly quickly, rather than insisting each part is perfect. I also am trying out jamming my arrangements rather than planning everything out in an arranger.
I only have myself to answer to, and only the scant hope of a release with someone else’s label/permission, at some imaginary distant future time. This means I can set my own timetables, goals, quality level, “message”, etc.
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I don’t think adding/switching out any more gear will get you to break away from the beats not songs problem, it will only cause the problem to happen on some other interface. Two solutions that work for me are just to keep moving, and set hard and regular deadlines/goals to make decisions happen faster. For the first one, when you got a groove going and you’ve liked it for more than an 8 bar loop, stop the playback and copy and paste the pattern to another slot and then switch to that slot to do some more editing. Just be confident in your ears. If you like the sound for a few loops, its a good sound and you should move on to the next segment of the song. Stopping playback is key here, since a lot of people just loop a 64 step pattern into eternity and after 15 minutes your brain starts to tell you that was once super sick is now sickening and you either add way too much nonsense on top of the track or your ears get so fatigued by the monotony that you think it all sucks and you throw away the beat. If you have a full pattern already and are stuck on where to go to, just do simple stuff like change up the hihat pattern, add some extra snares/claps, or add a ride to accompany the top end. Not all changes need to be extreme, and subtle movement every 8 bars or so will help motivate you to treat your beat as a living environment instead of a static loop.
For a lot of people, deadlines are a huge creative boost. Try to keep a hard schedule of something like “every week I’ll end with 2 finished mixdowns, regardless of the quality of the songs.” Even if it the worst thing you’ve ever written, just getting into the habit of pushing through the blocks and creating full tracks will train your brain to start thinking in a song mode rather than a loop mode. A nice upshot is that when/if you ever want to release some tracks, you will have a huge collection of stuff to choose from rather than just having 1 banger and 3 alright tracks.
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Thanks for your reply. Yes, willpower and mindset are probably quite important …
That’s really helpful. Thanks a lot!
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This really depends on what you think is not-song-like about what you’re currently making. Is it too short? Too simple? No melody? Only melody? No tension? No cohesion? Living in separate chunks and needs to be mixed? Living in separate clips and needs to be arranged?
There’s different solutions to all these issues, but they’re all learnable and solvable. You just have to focus on what you’re really trying to fix first.
For example, the gear you mention (DAW, 1010, OT) are all tools for very different problems. To know which one to apply to your situation, you have to be a little analytical about what you’re producing and where you want to take it.
And if you don’t know, maybe doing much more research on your style of music and learning what you like and don’t is the real first step?
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Trying to get into a daw for mac which can run overbridge (ableton or Bitwig) to separate my Digitakt Tracks.
Maybe i am exporting them into Cubasis (iPad Pro) cause my Mac is from 2010.
Lets See if thats the my workflow or in future managing everything in a Mac daw 
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I think I’m looking for a way to develop more structure, bring more order into a good sounding chaos. I’d like to achieve something that’s more listener-friendly (not everybody likes to listen to long jam sessions). So I thought maybe recording longer sessions with an Octatrack or a Blackbox, choosing the best parts and assembling something with a more conventional song structure out of it might be the way to go.
Yes, of course that’s a solution. On the other hand I’d like to stay away from the DAW as much as possible, because it kills the vibe for me (I know it sounds like a cliche).
Everyone’s brain works differently and everyone’s mind responds to different stimuli. So there’s no one size fits all solution to this issue. You can only try recommendations by some and see if they work for you.
Having said that, some of the best advice I got on this very topic was to listen to more good music. Don’t just listen, but analyze it and its structure as you listen. Note what the producer is doing every so often and how the sound(s) are changing - ever so slightly but they’re changing. Try to mimic that/those types of subtle changes.
I’m a deep house guy, and it always amazes me the simplicity of the songs that I absolutely love. Start with a single element or two and slowly add every 8 or 16 bars. Change filter frequencies or resonance slightly every 8 bars. Throw in slight turnarounds on the 4th or 8th beat of a pattern. Increase delay or reverb on certain hits. Change the effects sound or mix over the course of a pattern or two. Be subtle enough not to jar the listener’s ears, but big enough that it sounds different than eight or sixteen bars ago. Add a fill here or there at the end of a 16 bar pattern. These are all things I’ve noticed that are done in a six to eight minute song that exists primarily of the same three elements, yet keeps me mildly entertained.
And the good news - none of this requires a DAW.
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Feels like arrangement is the name of the game, then. And because it’s a jam, there’s usually not clearly defined sections to work with. Identifying those will be part of the arrangement process. So you need something more flexible than a standard multitrack or non-linear editor.
In this space, Live (or any of the numerous DAWs that have adapted Live-like clips interfaces) is hard to beat.
In particular, the OT excels at taking loops and expanding them into jams, not the other way around. And while the BB (like the OT) has something like a song mode, it’s not meaningfully different (apart from sample-length restrictions and a really nice touchscreen) from resampling sections of your jams into the DT and chaining them. And feels like you’re kind of at the limits of what that’s getting you?
So if you’re looking for a different paradigm to work your jams into structured songs, I’d say a DAW (and specifically Live) are the way to go.
But even being as objective as possible, music is a supremely subjective thing. I’m sure others have different takes.
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Surgeon made his raw trax with a minimalistic jam Setup:
„Recorded live in the studio using only a PIN Electronics Portabella synthesiser and a Roland TR-909 drum machine direct to DAT tape.“
For me it’s sounds much better than a lot of stuff from more complex daw productions. Surgeon is long enough in the business and knows what to do
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Yes, I like Surgeon very much. I totally trust his judgment. So I was a bit shocked when he said in an interview that he doesn’t like the Octatrack 
Yes, arrangement is the right term I was looking for. In the end there is probably no way around Live or Logic. Thanks for explaining OT and BB to me so well in a few words. Very helpful!
It sounds like a hate love relationship
I mean there are really two options in my mind–either performing things live (to some extent even if it is just launching patterns in the order you want) with a plan for structure in mind or recording stems/loops to your DAW and arranging there. I don’t see the point of recording to another piece of hardware as others have said.
If that is what you want to do you I’d recommend getting OB sorted in your DAW of choice and recording your jams then you can edit out the best parts and arrange them into something coherent.
You are very correct. Most people don’t want to listen to 10 minutes of someone free form jamming on one idea.
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Yes, the minimalistic approach is often the most challenging – “reduce it to the max”.
Indeed.
You’ll definitely get a lot out of consciously working on arrangement/composition/structure. A DAW can help you with this by giving you tools to lay out parts of a track and move them around until they “fit just right”… but you don’t need a DAW for this. You can work it into your jamming.
Imagine you’re in a band. In a band you “play songs” and jam with several other musicians. You each know (roughly) what you’re doing AND what everyone else is (meant to be) doing, for the whole song. It takes a few (many) passes, some discussion, some mistakes, the occasional beer thrown across the room, but eventually a consensus emerges.
As a solo producer, you and your gear are all of the band. Learn with what each “instrument” (drums/bass/drones/noises/melodies) do for the track. Learn this by playing about, and by listening to other peoples’ music, or by learning more music theory. There’s standard forms (e.g.: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-mid8-chorus, intro-groove-breakdown-drop-groove), and every possible variation. Write yourself notes: write it out; compose a poem and play to it; draw diagrams and follow them; invent your own notation (any shape that helps you remember what you’re supposed to be doing and for how long is fine).
(Don’t pour beer on your Elektrons.)
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I mean you could arrange in digitakt as well…
Say you have a 4 bar loop going. With a beat melody and the whole shebang.
Copy that pattern over to several patterns. Change them up, record a filter sweep on one pattern for a drop maybe… remove some tracks and add other parts for a b-section. maybe dissect one pattern for an intro… start from the beat and then use each pattern that you have pasted to add to the arrangement… when your done sample chain them and record it.
In reality that is basically what song mode is isn’t it, it’s just that your doing it yourself.
Be creative with what you got!
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