Tutorial: Timestretching of Amen Breaks on Digitakt

Hi!
I figured out an easy way of using the LFO as a way to time-stretch Amen Breaks on the Digitakt.
The loops will follow the tempo of the song and they can be re-pitched while retaining the tempo for an authentic old-school Jungle sound.

Premieres on Youtube tomorrow 13.00 CET =3

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Hang on, LFO and timestretching rings a bell. Wasn’t there a video floating around about a method on the Analog Rytm? :face_with_monocle:
Anyhow, Amen Break and Digitakt in the same sentence is always a good sign!

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Yeah I found a couple floating around out there that did some really interesting granular stuff but I couldn’t find one specifically for tempo-synced Amen breaks so I decided to make one myself =)

… and the Digitakt:

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Yeah my method reminds a little bit about the method Kryten42 demonstrated. I wanted to make a tutorial that explains how to achieve it and try to explain why it works too =)

Is it like this video but with beats? I’m curious to see how you finesse the loop :slight_smile:

Yeah I got a lot of inspiration from that video, very nice work with that vocal sample! =3

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Is this your first video tutorial for youtube?

No I made a Gameboy modding tutorial last summer which was good fun. :slight_smile:

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That’s really well made, I look forward to the digitakt tutorial!

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Thx alot! It was a load of work but good fun, happy you liked it. <3

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Thanks for this:)

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Yeah, i really like the LFO time stretch on the Digitakt, it’s flexible and fun once set up and a bit raw. I use it in this video too, just after the 2 minute mark…

I’m looking forward to @mackemint video

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Hey hadn’t seen that one, I’ll check it out later!
Thx :pray:t2:

Just had a watch, since the video wasn’t released at the time of the thread start.
I see which technique you’re using, seems to work pretty well for a break-sample type of sound. Very nice! The tutorial format was pretty cool too I guess, not too youtube’ish haha, still with a bit of jam fun at the end. Real sweet visuals too :alien: :alien:

Not quite sure how this LFO speed of 15.15 comes to be though? Normally when I want to have a bpm synced LFO running, I have it usually in a powers-of-two value (12 and 24 for dotted note sync).

Hmm, I think the other timestretch method I had in mind was something else. It used two tracks of for the same sound, but their sine LFOs were modulating the volume, offset by 180°. Reduces the clicky distortion a little, but you can’t really ‘jam’ the other parameters like with your method, because you can only really tweak the sound on one track, not on two at once.

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Ey thx, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out =3
Yeah I’m more of a Twitch person so this format felt more natural to me =D

Yeah the LFO speed is pretty wonky alright.
From the Digitakt manual: “Speed sets the speed of the LFO. Try settings of 8, 16 or 32 to sync the LFO to straight beats”
-64 -> 63 == 128 and 128 / 15.15 is ~= 8,45 so it doesn’t make a lot of sense =D

Sine LFOs modulating the volume? =o This sounds very interesting, can you provide an example?

To be honest I can’t really give you any more in depth info from the source, I’ve had a very vague memory about a tutorial showcasing the basic idea for a long time. Really don’t know where I’ve seen it though.

This is a template pattern that I made a while ago for copy/pasting. There’s a sample with a length of 32 steps playing alternately on track 7 and 8. There are 8th note triggers on the odd steps, in the other track, even steps. Each one of the 8th notes has a motion sequence that scrolls through the sample duration. Both tracks have an LFO on the amplitude – when the LFO turns one volume up, the other track gets turned down symmetrically.
So the tracks are alternating via the step sequence and via their LFOs, so that there’s always sound coming from at least one source. Since it’s all smoothly aligning and blending in/out, you don’t hear the clicks so much, but you get this timestretchy metallic smeared sound on some bpm settings.
I hope I made sense with these sentences haha, I can provide more details if you want to.

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Intersting, defo less glitchy and more smoove. Depends what youre after really. Good to be aware of both options. :love_you_gesture:t2:

I think I have figured out how this works.

Let’s keep in mind a few well known things.

  • Every sample is always 120 sample units long regardless of its length in seconds.
  • The wave we are using in the LFO is half a saw up, half a 0 value, so we just want to use the first half of it.
  • LFO depth values can only be set from -64.0 to + 63.0.

Also, notice that from the first point, it’s easy to see that the shorter the sample in seconds the faster we have to increment the position in sample units. If sample A is half the length in seconds that a sample B, the speed of the LFO should be twice (inverse proportion).

For perfectly trimmed samples (120 sample units corresponds to an exact amount of bars) we want to modulate the sample start from 0 to 120 so LFO depth should be set to 120 but it is not possible to use such a value. But in this particular case, both speed and depth affect the sample position so let’s use 60.0 for now.

At this point we need to set the total speed, which is the product of the speed control and the multiplier. What I usually do is to set the speed value to 8.0 and set the multiplier to adjust the total speed.

For a 4 bar loop, the speed should be set to 16; for a 2 bar loop, the speed should be set to 32; and for a 1 bar loop, the speed should be set to 64. I guess, the reason why a 4 bar loop works with 16 is because we need to multiply the depth by 2 but as we need to use only half the way we can just leave it as it is.

This will provide perfect timing if the sample is perfectly trimmed. If not, set LFO depth to half the sample length you want to use and adjust the multiplier as explained above.

I’ve noticed that a fine adjustment of the LFO depth might be needed if the sample is not the perfect size and the timestretching effect is extreme.

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Ive messed around with LFO-based stretching on the DT and quite like using 1/80 Retrigs as the ‘grain’ rate. Works pretty well…

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