Can someone explain the difference please without telling me to read the manual? I don’t yet have the AR, but have a MKII coming whenever it’s out and a OTMKII as well. I had the Digitakt for a bit before I returned it and I was doing where you can have say a 4 on the floor pattern and on one particular trig add a reverb effect. Is that a P-lock or a trig condition?
Any help appreciated.
Thanks
In your example, that’s a parameter lock (p-lock): it just means that on one sequencer step you automate a specific setting of a value of a parameter (here, reverb send amount) that is a different value from the default value for the track.
“Trig condition” is a particular parameter for a sound trigger. The default behaviour is to simply play the sound on each step where a trigger has been set. But you can p-lock the Trig Condition parameter on a particular step, so that the playback behaviour is changed: for example, you can set it to:
The terminology is always a bit strange until you get used to it, especially if you haven’t had the chance to get hands-on with the gear!
So, to sumemrize,
P-Locks is the name for the fact that you can basically change every parameter on every step. This is easily the most powerful function of elektron sequencers.
You select the step and change all the parameters you want and then the step will play like that. You can do this for any step.
Trig conditions are a special parameter (also per step) that allows you to change whether a step is played or not.
You can set it for instance to 50% and then there will be a 50% chance that that step will play when the sequence comes around.
You can also set things like ‘play every 3rd of four times the sequence is run through’. Then the sequencer will ignore the step on the first two times the sequence plays, then play it on the third time, then ignore it for one more sequence loop, then start over again, ignoring the first 2, play in the 3rd runthrough, ignore once more, etc.
That way you can make for instance a 16 step sequence play something different after a few cycles.
Ok thanks. Is there a retrig as well? Like on my Toraiz you can take a single step and make it a triplet or whatever? Finally, does the AR do both trig conditions and p-locks?
Yes & Yes
Using Digitakt and Overbridge - can you multitrack audio with the p-locks and c-trigs real time into ableton?