Personally, the ability to save song chains is mostly what I need. I don’t really see the Digitakt as the solution for full-blown arrangements (I have Renoise for that). But as a bassist (two hands busy much of the time) it would be really nice to be able to program 16- or 32-bar phrases.
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not on the silverboxes…you can mute just bits/pieces of patterns using the offset/length parameter.
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Or copy pattern 1 to pattern 2, take out final kick in pattern 2, song mode 3 x 4 bars pattern 1, the once pattern 2 with 4 bars (the ‘fill’ pattern)
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this is what i do on the analog boxes
If you don’t like it, don’t use it. I think there are enough people who find it useful, including me, to warrant the inclusion.
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Benefits of song mode: organized noise
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i couldnt care less about song mode… you can simply do it all manually by pressing a few buttons - so im one person that you wont find talking about it. as the name implies - its used to create ‘a song’ as in a a pre planned arrangement - which can be useful if you are a live performer.
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You know you can also use a camera to take pics of all your settings - so who needs presets right?
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If you dont want to…
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Then why would they leave it out of the internal routing if it’s essentially already in there?
Seems silly to have this midi modular setup.
But I guess a workaround is a workaround. Have you done this yet? What are it’s limitations?
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I didn’t know it didn’t have song mode til after I bought it and unless someone tells me it will be added very very soon I’m going to sell it even tho I love the sound and using it. why? because I can’t program a whole song in it. I don’t want to use it live. I want to put the drums/beats for whole songs together in it. it didn’t even occur to me it wouldn’t have it and obviously the feature list didn’t include what seemingly normal features it DOESN’T have… very disappointing for me. because like I said I really love it other than that one thing.
so please someone tell me they can and will add a song mode PLEASE
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They’re not going to add it. They have said so since the beginning. They want you to buy an additional Elektron product for song mode. Their business model is about leaving out basic/obvious features in each machine so you have to buy additional machines.
I keep reading people saying that they do that on purpose, just seems so weird, buying a pretty expensive drum machine that doesn’t have one obvious feature is not going to make me buy another expensive piece of gear to complement it… it’s going to make me sell it and find an alternative that does have the features I need.
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expecting a 650$ box to carry the same features of the boxes that are 1300$ is a little bit of a stretch. also, I do not think the model is to get people to buy boxes by leaving out features, especially seeing as the 1300$ devices have a full spread of features and were released well before the digi. The digi is an entry level machine for elektron, even at the price of 650$.
that being said there are a few work around the achieve a song mode like state (i.e. midi routing) on the digitakt. there is also the pattern chain feature and since the digi will remember mutes and bpm by pattern and globally this can really be used to simulate a song mode. one would simply chain up the patterns needed to create a song. not as easy as song mode because you cant save chains but really what is elektron’s song mode, pattern chaining with the ability to save.
i believe it has been mentioned that the ability to save chains may be added to the digitakt in the future.
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Benefit: pattern chains would surely be saved inside a song mode. If song mode never come i hope we can save pattern chains
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i’d love me some saving chained patterns and kit saving 
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Many comments about song mode being a performance tool. Sure… but also it makes it more like a workstation in that you can create full arrangements and pieces in a sudo-studio setting. I do agree with the sentiment of it being an entry-level device for Elektron’s offerings. DT is my first, and I’m already eyeing the bigger boxes.
I’ve been playing live hardware sets with the Digitakt as a centerpiece for a few months now. For me, I wouldn’t use a song mode if it was there, the way the patterns are set up is more then enough, even simultaneously controlling a mixing desk, keyboard, circuit, launchcontrol xl mapped to Digitakt, delay and a volca sample it’s easy to press PTN - # before the end of the bar when you want to go to the next pattern, I’ve even got enough time to do it manually on all three samplers.
In a studio environment it’s not hard to lay out your patterns sequentially and just trigger next one any point when you feel like it needs to move on (song mode would save you one button press every minute or so…).
This allows a lot more room for happy accidents and variations in the studio (the point of the machine), and live it gives you a lot more freedom to actually ‘play’ live and go with the crowd - leave that breakdown for another 8 bars, switch it up and go back and remix the 1st drop because the crowd loved it so much etc. Song mode would take this freedom away from you and turn it into a tweakable jukebox.
Once again, it takes me about .1 of a second to press the button, it takes more time to actually conjure the thought -“Hey I want this to change now.”
So that considered I’d say there are actually more negatives then benefits for me.
There’s no song mode on this machine because that’s not the point of the machine, your meant to actually play it, it’s not trying to be or meant to be an MPC Live or Ableton. It’s an instrument. It’s about fast fluid hands on workflow, experimentation. Song mode gets in the way of that, slows down workflow, skews the focus of the machine. You want to write whole songs and sit back and press play? Yeah they made a machine for that years ago, it’s called the Octatrack, go get that.
This isn’t some Elektron conspiracy or a purposefully omitted feature. It’s stripped backed on everything but the essentials to focus your workflow and creativity, to make it simple intuitive and fun. They nailed it. If all of these feature requests got in there it would make the OS bloated, more menu diving, hell might as well be an Octatrack, which no one has ever described as fast or simple.
I can create more complex, interesting and complete patterns quicker on this thing then any hardware I’ve used, the Circuit was renowned for that and this blows it out of the water workflow and speed wise. If they weren’t ruthless and focused in their vision of what they wanted this to do, this wouldn’t be the case. It’s like using a DAW, with infinite choice decisions get harder, things take longer. What they have left out has helped focus this into the fastest and most creative sampler ever IMO.
Also zfigz there is kit saving, the kit is stored with the pattern. It’s just a different structure to what your used to but you can still copy those kits around and use them like kits, the functionality is there.
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I’m happy with where the DT is at currently, but for my needs, I would very much appreciate a song mode and a convenient/organized way to save kits.
Song mode is a pretty simple feature and wouldn’t add any bloat/clutter to the simple interface of the DT in my opinion.
The current way to save kits, while straightforward, isn’t anything like a traditional kit saving option. Sure, it works to save your settings, but having to recall “just those settings” is a bit of a pain in that you have to copy/paste certain elements.
Anyhoo, glad to hear it’s working out for you so well as a live instrument. I’ll be keeping the DT whether or not they add any kit saving/song mode options, though my love would become that much stronger for it.