LFO note triggers

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

I was playing with midi LFOs into my OB6, making beats with the individual mix levels and thought it felt nice to have dials for controlling tempos slightly offset from eachother. I’ve seen a bit of this around with modular setups but never taken to extremes or used in performance so I thought I’d use my Digitakt and Blokas Midihub to make something. If anyone has any thoughts on how to improve it, or just a “you’re reinventing box ___ that already exists” comment, please say.

I started with the Digitakt midi LFOs but I couldn’t get them reliable enough so shifted to a system of square wave LFOs in the midihub (three of them, one for midi channels 1,2,3). These LFOs have their rate controlled by a midi CC that comes in on the relevant channel and whenever the square wave hits 127 (flipping between 0 and 127) it triggers a midi note on that channel.

To make it easier to keep the three LFOs in sync I mapped the LFO retrigger to a midi note (on channel 1-3 depending on which LFO needs to be retriggered) and sequenced these notes on the Digitakt at the start of the pattern. This step isn’t essential but it’s there to make the three line up a bit more.

I wasn’t sure it’d work, as the inner-mapping thing is new to the Midihub but it seems to! I think adding more CC controls to deal with note number and velocity would be a next stage and then maybe allowing two LFOs to work on the same channel creating more complex rhythms.

Here’s a silly, totally unmusical video to show how ridiculous this can get. I’m impressed with how fast the Digitakt can trigger which makes this useful for ambient stuff as well if you pick the right samples and settings. If you put some Digitakt midi LFOs on the CCs controlling the Midihub LFOs you could take this to all sorts of places.

Happy to share the midihub setup if anyone’s intrigued but also interested to hear if anyone’s done something similar or has any thoughts on working with this. Going to try to make something musical with it next!

The ultimate dream would be to have a per track lfo advance step speed on the Digitakt all controlled internally as you could do some terrifying things with that but also rein it in for something musical.

3 Likes
Devices that punch above their weight?
#2

Talking to myself but think this is getting cool enough to share more.

Slept on it and made some little tweaks before work. Switched the one channel per LFO thing to just be three different CCs as you can’t do multiple channels on one track on the Digitakt. Doing that and having them on one screen suddenly makes it much more creative to sequence with. Still not musical yet as just stabbed at a synth pad, added a filter LFO to a crappy high hat sound and played around but hopefully this is more of an indication of what could be done with this.

Next I’ll add some CCs to control velocity and another LFO so the four knobs on the Digitakt can be the four LFOs with BPM on the top knob and a velocity LFO on the other. Could do the velocity directly in the Digitakt but having it as a CC means this thing will be portable to any other device.

2 Likes