Im a long time Cirklon user and I’ve always used that to do my arrangements, however, I’m in love with the Digitakt 2 and was hoping someone could point me to some tips a tricks or workflow videos, where someone composes a song on the Digitakt 2 (or other Elektron device) rather than set up some patterns to jam with.
Or even point me in the direction of paid courses where this is the subject matter.
(For example, Jeremy from Red Means Recording, talks a bit about how he approaches composing on the M8 (and trackers in general) which I found immensely useful when I approached composing on the M8 myself.)
I’ve used the song mode on the DT1 pretty extensively since getting one. What do you want to know?
For a few general tips:
Use patterns 1-8 for your core patterns, and with variation patterns on 9-16, 1 related to 9, 2 related to 10, etc. Then you know where everything is when it comes to doing the arrangement.
Set up your maximum chain length in advance, or leave it as default if you are not doing different pattern lengths, and work within those numbers so that you can get predictable pattern changes in your arrangement.
Turn off your global mutes before going into song mode, and set your mutes in there. You can use global mutes while performing a song mode, and they will override your song mode mutes.
It is easy to get disoriented when turning song mode on, because if there is a song already loaded on the project, turning song mode on will move you to the first pattern of that song automatically. It caught me out a few times where I was on Bank C working on a song, opened song mode which loaded a song that was made from patterns in Bank B and it moved my view to Bank B. Took me a while to figure out what was happening.
What I do now is to work on a song until I’m happy, save it, and then load a blank song as the last thing I do. Then when I come back to a project to make the next song, there isn’t a previous song waiting in the background to confuse me when I turn song mode back on.
Related to this, if you have song mode turned on, and you switch to a pattern to make edits that is in a different location to where the song mode is currently pointing, it turns song mode off. This tripped me up a few times, but makes perfect sense in practice.
