Some thoughts on using samples rather than sounds

Just got my new Digitakt and thoroughly enjoying it so far. I already have the OT MkII and the DN, so it was very easy to pick up. I’ve been making beats way faster than when I was using the OT MkII, probably because there’s less to dial into the settings. Even when compared to the DN, the DT is more limited in that there aren’t multiple parameter pages under one button (DN has SYN1 1/2 and SYN 1/2 pages, whereas DT just has one FLTR, one AMP, one LFO page and so one), which I actually appreciate in that it keeps everything very contained and controlled in a way that speaks to me.

I posted in another thread about it, but my favorite feature of the DT so far has been the independence between trig note and sample tune, which allows me to “correct” the pitch of my sample so that a C note plays a C pitch, which you cannot do without resampling on the OT.

One thing I’ve been thinking about as I looked through the DT forum is that a significant number of people have found issue with the 2048 limit on the Sound Pool, as well as the difficulty in transferring sounds (C6 or Sysex Librarian messing up, MIDI settings, etc.) to and from their computers. In my usage of the DT, and perhaps due to my prior workflow from the OT, I don’t really rely on Sounds, and instead just start from raw samples that I select in the Samples menu and load onto my project RAM. One thing that I didn’t know before I bought the DT was that there is no limit to the number of Samples you can put on the DT. The limit is only on the Sound Pool (2048) and Project Sound Pool (128) and Sample Lists (127).

Even on the Digitakt manual, Elektron states “the primary benefit of Sounds loaded to the Sound pool is the possibility for them to be Sound locked.” Besides that, I don’t see much use in the Sound Pool, as I’m not much of a preset diver. I find preset-based workflow to be pretty limiting and time-consuming, and samples already seem like kind of a “preset” to me, so I’ve enjoyed starting from just samples and making my tracks from scratch every time. “From scratch” always seems to have this connotation of being a long-winded process, and it indeed is on certain devices, but with the DT, there’s only so much you can do with a sample anyway, so for me it really doesn’t take that much longer than if I had stored a bunch of Sounds and started my tracks with them.

tl;dr: The DT is just as limited as I had hoped, and the limitations it possesses are exactly the ones I needed to speed up my workflow. However, the one limitation it doesn’t have that surprised me is that there is no limit on the number of Samples it can hold on the +Drive. Mono samples are half the size of stereo samples too, so when I loaded a 600MB package onto my DT through Transfer, in only took up about 300MB!

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The limitation is 1GB (size) not quantity.

One major benefit to sounds is it includes the sample reference plus all of the parameters (amp/flt/etc) which means you can swap an entire sound on one track very easily. Plus you can export your own sounds to be used in the same song you’re working on to save time and get more that 8 tracks worth of audio by using multiple sounds per track (monophonic of course).

i very rarely use sounds… just samples .
probably 99% i just go straight to samples. (if you are new to digitakt i always encourage people to actually understand the difference between sounds and samples , it crops up on this forum quite often )

i wouldnt expect there to be a limit on the +drive except for memory usage, its basically the hard drive and is separate amount of memory which the sampler actually uses in a project.

Mono samples are always half the size (same sound) as they will always contain exactly half of the sound.

One plus of how they work is indeed like RandomSkratch already wrote the ability to store all values with a sample in a “sound”. My usual way of working:

  • Mostly just samples instead of sounds.
  • Sometimes I use a sample pack which includes “sounds” connected to the samples. Interesting to me also to see how they used different parameters to tweak their samples in new ways to me.
  • As a way of simple sample management: I sometimes save favorite samples as “sounds”. This way the samples stay in the folder they belong, but I can easily find some favorites if I’m not in the mood for sample-searching folders. Plus the parameters I used on the sample are stored with the sound.

The sound pool is vastly underused for me as well but it’s good for saving melodic synth sounds you’ve put some work into, like doubletracking and resampling. Most rhythmic elements get individual treatment from scratch anyway and the DT is so quick it’s a non issue.

The Sounds are really usefull for the synth superpower of the DT. Just load a single cycle waveform, play it in loop, adjust AMP, FLT, LFO, FX… Save it to a Sounds preset. With the same waveform, like a simple triangle that cost just few bits on disk usage, you can make lots of differents sounds.
I just know one guy that sell a Sounds pack for the DT, there are just few wave files in the pack and a sysex that create A LOT of differents drums, synth and FX froms the same bunch of sampes.

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