Suggest the easiest workflow for layering the patterns?

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

Hey fellow Elektronauts! Thanks for being such a supportive community. I’m a newbie half way through DMM 4th edition.

What would be the easiest way to incapsulate following workflow. Let’s say I’ve managed to create a drum loop. I save a pattern. Okay, now I would like that pattern to still play while I’m mangling chords or something else.

I kinda learned that that workflow is “built-in” into octatrack but I’ve already got myself digitakt+digitone and lack of overbridge stops me from even wanting octatrack :frowning:

I also know that there are “loop” equipment eg RC 505 which could potentially record loop and play it while im continuing to mess with digitakt

But would it be possible to incapsulate it using “just” digitakt and Ableton? From my understanding I could “capture” my lets say drum loop into Ableton and play it on repeat from there, but I guess everything would go out of “sync” then :confused:

Any tips are welcomed!

PS my gear is digitakt digitone and arturia keystep and ableton :slight_smile: im learning ableton but id like to stay out of daw for as much as possible because at the moment digitakt is so much easier for me to experiment and learn the basics :slight_smile:

#2

If you’ve run out of audio tracks while making your drum loop, you can use fixed length internal resampling and essentially bounce all your drum tracks down to a single audio track and then start a new pattern with that and have all of the other tracks freed up for melody etc. It’s pretty similar to using a looper and, as an internal recording, it’s already synced to your sequence bpm if you use the recording gate at a fixed length. You will need to commit to a bpm to do this.

If you haven’t yet learned about the sound pool, I would encourage you to look into it because it will allow you to get more out of the audio tracks. You can usually use the sound pool to build a drum line out of only one or two tracks since it allows more than one sound (sample) per track.

Sound pool is the workflow you’re probably looking for but in your current situation, the work around is internal resampling. You can also then use slice machine to cut the resampled loop into steps so that you can still use your mutes while playing the new the pattern.

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#3

By the way, in case it will help, linked below is a really good post explaining the specific workflow of putting sounds into the sound pool. After that you just treat samples in the sound pool the same as parameters and lock them to steps on a track by holding down the trig you want to lock the sound (sample) to.

If you had kick and snare on one track (for example) the only limitation is if a “sound” is playing and another one comes in (over the top of it), it will choke out the first sound and play the second one until a new sound comes in due to the nature of the audio tracks being monophonic, that’s why this works particularly well for drums which (as one shot samples) are short, however you can do this with any sample and make it a “sound” by following the process to enter it into the sound pool.

Everything about using resampling, gated recordings, recording length, slice machine to slice and lay consecutive trigs is all covered (and pretty straight forward) in the manual but if something isn’t making sense just reply to this post and I’ll try to help you out.

Just want to make sure I didn’t lose you on my initial reply, I know it’s not always the same to have someone tell you that this book is written in Latin as it is to have someone show you how you can learn to read Latin :slight_smile:

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#4

I think your best bet for now is to resample back in to the digitakt and then use that loop on one channel of the next pattern.

You can sync the digitakt with a DAW but in my opinion it’s less intuitive than using the hardware alone.

Edited just to say the technicalities of how are covered fantastically above, my opinion is only there to say what I think is the nicest strategy!

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#5

You’re awesome @shigginpit ! I’ve already learned how to resample - I kinda cut out a kick out of Splice Lyre competition submission using Ezbot video about chords which I’m learning now but the fact that I can do the same for the entire loop blew my mind! :heart_eyes:

Again many thanks for the pointers. I’m now equipped with material to go through. Have a nice weekend evening!

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#6

Awesome, the only other advice that I would give you on this is to make sure that you pay attention to your individual track levels and be happy with the drum mix before resampling since you’re stuck with it afterwards (unless you want to go through resampling all over again). Good luck, and no problem.

#7

Thank you @alexleigh83 ! Trying to resort to daw only at the very latest stages (eg that’s how I “record” track to mp3 for sharing) is my goal to really learn the magic box which digitakt is and production basics along the way!

#8

:joy: Me…every time.

#9

in reality it requires a bit of clairvoyance with the way digitakt automatically normalizes even the internal sampling. elektron, if you’re listening I’d still love to be able to turn off normalization so that it’s an option, not a workflow.

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