Sample Chains on Digitakt

Just joined Elektronauts. Whats up!? I couldn’t find a dedicated thread on this topic but if I missed one, my apologies.

A friend told me about using sample chains on his RYTM and Octatrack and I wanted to try it on the digitakt. My understanding on sample chains thus far is:

There are (on the OT or RYTM… not sure which) 120 possible sample start points, which can be parameter locked. If you arrange 120 samples in a DAW (good explanations on how to do this exist elsewhere in these forums), you can then parameter lock the sample start point at will and you will have all kinds of variation (depending on the samples you chained together) from just one track! You can of course p lock the sample slot itself, but sample chains are a different way of doing this. Additionally, you can have a sample browser of sorts on one sample, ie: you have a sample chain full of snares and you can select the snare you one from the sample chain, freeing up space in your ram for other samples and enabling easy variations of snare sound within one track. Lots of cool creative potential here.

SO, my question is: how does sample chaining work on the digitakt? I ask because the sample start point goes down to the hundredth, P locking a sample chain of 120 samples will not get you to the sample start guaranteed because you could end up at 30.56 and getting exactly to 30 is a pain. If you press and hold E in the SRC page, it moves by increments of 4, which means you can sample chain 30 samples together and the p locking will totally work (as long as you press down the E encoder while you P lock the start point).

If my math is correct, the only way you can get OT/RYTM style sample chaining is if you chain 12000 samples together? Or is there some way to jump by rounded numbers on the digitakt that I don’t know about?

Thus far, chaining 30 samples together and p locking the start point with the E encoder pushed down has been working for me, just wondering if there’s a 2.0 version of this that enables you to chain more than 30 samples together.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

1 Like

Hehe 12000 samples would be quite more than 64 mb :wink:

It’s not impossible to dial in integers. Just move the encoder slower as you reach one.

I’d keep it at 30 samples. That’s already a lot. You have 64 mb Ram so using more samples per chain will just lower the amount of slots you can use even more.

1 Like

Delete please

It works just like it does on the Rytm apart from the two decimals in the values for sample start etc.

There is no way to snap to integer values. Twist the knob slower and you will get the precision you need. I don’t have any problems setting a value like 30.00 for sample start.

Use small “normal” chains, larger ones are not so practical. Try out some that Rytm owners have made and shared, that’s a quickstart.

This calculator helps if you need to figure out the slice start stop boundaries.
http://bl.ocks.org/NickDimmock/raw/3e8dd44a8e777129d332/

3 Likes

I did a lot of fiddling with sample chains (big proponent of them on Rytm and of course OT) on Digitakt. Decided that because there is no waveform zoom on the SRC page, a short sample “stream” of just 4 hits is a good way to make the most of the 127 sample slots, but also utilize the waveform display in a less fiddly way.

I demonstrate and describe the reasoning/advantages of sample streams in more detail here:

12 Likes

Its hard to get the start time right with longer sample chains.

I set the sample trigs 1,5,9,13 then adjust the sample start time to match the metronome click. You can pretty much get it bang on then :blush:

Although you have to convert them from AIF to WAV, I find op-1 drum kits are perfect for “sample streams” on the Digitakt. And theres a TON of them out there

4 Likes

Hi all. I’ve seen various bits of advice for setting up sample chains in Digitakt, but when I play back my chains I get glitches in the sound of each sample. My current settings are:

Five different closed high hats in one chain, all with length of 24 (i.e. making 120 in total). I created these in Octachainer at 128bpm.

Trig:
LFO.T: On

SRC
STRT: 48 (i.e. exactly the mid point of my five samples so that the +/- depth of the random LFO can select any of the five samples)
LEN: 24

AMP: default settings (I tried various settings included Hold Time: NOTE, but with no improvement).

LFO
SPD: 16
MULT: BPM 1
DEST: SAMP STRT
WAVE: RND
TRIG MODE: HLD
DEP: 32

With these settings if I play a pattern of 16 trigs and hold down the SRC button I can see all five samples being randomly triggered, but with the glitches in the sound.

Please can anyone who has successfully used chains on hi hats or other repetitive, percussive sounds, advise how to do it using sample chains (I know that separate samples, sound locks etc. are an alternative, but I would like to use sample chains if possible).

Many thanks in advance.

2 Likes

Short fade in (ATK on the amp page) helps sometimes but I guess the sample playback position just before switching to the new start point is the issue with the clicks.

Just like if you have a sample loop where only the left point is at zero crossing, doesn’t sound all that great.

Thanks and agree (and a problem with including a small amp attack is that this would impact the hat hat transients). I think the issue is also to do with the need to set the modulation amount very, very precisely.

Any other pearls of wisdom out there?

I typically (I could well be doing things badly)
Use 120bpm when using octachainer
Use even number of sample , probably 8 if it’s going on DT. If going on octatrack I still keep it simple so that I could reuse same chain on DT without messing around.
Use simple values that are easy to dial in for sample start point , typically with same sample length even if it’s wasteful , though tends to be equivalent to 1/16 to help avoid clicks envelopes on my typical percussion. (Or just use short snappy amp envelope)
Don’t bother using lfo’s To get random type sample triggering on start position because it’s a pain in the arse. Pre plock samples and use Lfo on something else (filter , amp attack , pitch)

It’s very possible to get Lfo syncd with speed / trig / movement to get correct start points , but I prefer easier way to do it.

Keep it simple.

4 Likes

the LFO’s RND is not as sophisticated as you seem to think it is!

It can only start the sample at random positions along the sample, within the range set by DEPTH. It can’t randomly jump between multiples of a specified DEPTH value.

Can someone please explain how you get the samples to be evenly spaces in the sample chain?

Or is that not important, as long as you can zoom in on the start points of each hit in the chain?

Also, what is the ideal amount of samples in a sample chain? It seems best to keep them shorter, yeah?

Use Octachainer’s ‘Evenly Spaced Grid’ feature to output many samples as one evenly spaced sample:

2 Likes

If you have a daw, simply spread samples evenly a across the time line. The space between each sample should be identical. Also make sure that space is present after the last sample as well. So a kick placed at every second beat on the time line for instance.

I found 6 samples per chain to be ideal for digitakt since you can’t zoom on the src page. This way the start parameter will select each sample with increments of 20 and the visual feedback will be easy to handle. This applies to fairly short one shots.

Hope this helps.

14 Likes

Very much - thank you Dave!

If you look at Ivar Tryti’s tutorial, you will have a better understanding of Sample Chain.

4 Likes

Thanks man. :+1:t5:

1 Like

I tried that with a sine wave, in order to use single cycle waveforms chains. Around 25 sec sample, not that long.
Doesn’t seem possible to use it properly, Start and Lenth are not precise, and you can hear different values between a displayed increment.
Ex : between LEN 0.01 and 0.02 you can hear 3 different settings, not only 1. :sketchy:

30 samples is more usable with 4 values increments pressing the knob, but I noticed that it wasn’t precise either.
On certain samples with sine waves, 0.01, 4.01, 8.01 etc values were more accurate than 0.00, 4.00, 8.00.

Boring.

I don’t know if this has been said already but parameters values jump in whole numbers when using an external midi controller and therefor sample chains of 120 samples are viable. :grin:

Pretty cool.

For what it’s worth, prior to this, I’ve found making sample chains 8 samples long and saving the 8 ‘slice’ parameters (start/length) as ‘sounds’ to be very useful.