Question regarding tap tempo and song mode

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
1

Hi, I don’t own any Elektron devices currently but am looking at buying a Digitone II as a drum machine / groovebox for my new band (guitar, bass, & me on vox / drum machine), rather than to use a laptop to play backing tracks.

I’ve been reading the manual back to front to make sure a Digitone II is the right device, but I can’t find an answer to how tap tempo interacts with the song mode’s specified tempo. I’ve put 2 examples below as to what I’m wondering about

Example 1: one of our songs starts with guitar for 4 bars before the drums kick in. We have no IEM rig so we can’t run a click (and building an IEM rig would evaporate the budget that I’d need for a drum machine), so I’m hoping to be able to tap tempo on the DNII as the guitarist plays, and then start the song on the fifth bar. But I worry that song mode’s tempo list will overwrite my tap tempo when I start it?

Example 2 is a lot more fiddly: another song has a gradual ritardando across about 8 bars, before suddenly jumping back up to the original tempo. I’m hoping to slowly nudge the tempo down manually for this one, and then use the DNII to play 4 bars of the new tempo to cue everyone in. My concern is whether I can actually nudge the tempo and the reset it during song mode?

To answer some potential solutions:

  1. Why can’t I use a laptop? Because using them live scares me. I’ve had terrible experiences dealing with plugins and hosts - managing CPU and latency, and having absolute hell dealing with MIDI controllers randomly unmapping themselves. In addition I don’t like leaving a running laptop setup live on stage before a show - as something always goes horribly wrong before we actually start playing. My favourite bands (NIN, Enter Shikari, Everything Everything) all use them fantastically but they do have whole teams keeping them running… I want something I can rely on to just turn on and start working, because I’ll mostly be at the front of the stage singing. I’d rather not be a backing track and monitor engineer whilst singing.
  2. What about a backing track device like the Octatrack? Would be a fantastic solution if I didn’t feel I was going to need to rewrite sequences when we get to rehearsals. I want to have the ability to change patterns if better ideas come up when preparing songs for live shows. I don’t want to just blast studio tracks over the PA, I want it to actually feel like a live band - albeit with a mental glitchy drum synth instead of a drummer. I also want to use the Digitone’s param-lock features to replace my current workflow of using copious amounts of automation in Ableton Live - which is not only prone to just breaking sometimes, but is also painfully slow to work with, especially as I’m trying to work with other musicians.

I’m open to some pretty out-there solutions. I’m already seeing how I can rearrange some of the songs so that everyone has some form of cue… although figuring out how we’re all gonna hear all of this in some dingy dive bar with one floor monitor for three people is a bridge I really don’t want to cross right now… :upside_down_face:

2

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Hmm, I don’t really use song mode very often but I suspect that if it requires you to commit to a tempo that it won’t work, however maybe someone else has tried it the way that you’re thinking and will be able to confirm. Does your guitarist play the tempo differently every time? I’d think that with any small amount of consistency you wouldn’t really need to tap the tempo, just start the transport on the correct beat.

For the second example, if I’m understanding correctly, yes you can manipulate the tempo of a pattern live and then return it back to the original tempo very quickly by using FUNC+NO which immediately reloads a pattern from the temporary pattern storage area. This would be when you’re working with standalone patterns or pattern chains, again I don’t know how song mode would behave with this use.

Song mode is like chaining patterns and storing them with a collection of prearranged mute states, but you can still chain patterns together without song mode so that’s an option as well.

So essentially, any tempo which you have saved with the pattern, and any sequencer settings will be immediately restored as long as that was the last state of your pattern when it was most recently saved.

Hopefully that gives you at least a partial answer and good luck with your research.

3

Digitone can send MIDI clicks to the cheapest of synths at the start of a song… that synth can be connected to anything.

Each row in song mode can override the global tempo. I don’t think you can slowly ramp tempo up/down though.

4

Thanks for the replies!

Yes this sounds like it would work well for me… I think I might be able to get away with only one or two patterns for that song as it’s quite repetitive, so song mode might not prove too much of an issue. I read somewhere that song mode isn’t the only way of chaining patterns together on the Digi devices?

I’d considered this before just to run a click, but instead I could just use a musical cue to start a song from the DNII directly. That seems smarter.

Thats a shame but it also seems like a workable limitation.

Thanks both! If anyone else has input on this please let me know. I’m considering picking up a Digitone II before New Year