Good morning to you all, unless it isn’t morning in your part of the world. In which case: Good whatever.
Tomorrow sees the arrival of a Digitakt to my setup; the glowing reports, enthusiasm and energy that the device has attracted encouraged me to spend again.
My current set up now has Ableton Live, Machinedrum, Analog Four and an Analog Heat with Ableton gradually doing less and less other than me recording audio into it so I end up with a track that I finally trigger.
Anyway . . . I don’t have a hardware background although my setup is certainly starting to contain more Elektron boxes. As such, ideas about Digitakt controlling things etc. are completely alien to me and, as I considered this, it dawned on me that there are probably many things that I simply don’t consider doing because my electronic music paradigm is so much based upon Ableton and my Macbook.
So . . . With these 4 boxes that I will be looking together tomorrow, what are the Digitakt Must Dos that I would benefit/enjoy/learn from the most? What things would cause the largest paradigm shift?
Many thanks for any ideas and pointers and thoughts etc.
It probably makes sense to take some time with the DT (or running it through AH), before you add A4/MD to the mix again. Explore the factory content, check out the transfer app. You’ll recognize a lot of stuff from your other Elektrons. Try to internalize switching between the different mute modes and chromatic mode, quick saving of patterns and reverting to their original state after messing with CTRL-ALL (which you already know from MD). You should understand the difference between a sample and a sound. By all means check out the sampling process. For me that’s the most fun part. Having a Y cable to hook up a smartphone/tablet to sample random crap from adds to the fun. Overall DT is a fairly simplistic affair compared to it’s siblings, no major paradigm shift.
Thanks for the tips. I’m interested to see what things are implicit from the other machines I have.
And this sounds and samples that you mention will be singing I’ll look out for.
What about the midi capabilities; I’ve read some people saying that Digitakt has become the centre of their setup. Could this kill off Ableton for me?
It has for me - now Live is slaved, with the DT controlling an OT, and AK and some other synths.
It works fine, but you need to configure Ableton in this rather obscure and unknown fashion:
I bought a MIDI Thru box to avoid the daisy chaining of devices. Ableton is receiving over USB.
One thing you can do is have DT send Program Changes, so the patterns switch at the same time (there may be some bugs around this, I’ve seen delays in the AK changing patterns where odd lengths are involved).
Nope, none at all, it just works great. Using the machines in this way really unlocks the power in the sequencers. Of course, you can also get into other areas where the DT is also sending (conditional trigs) MIDI to the other devices, for interesting variations.
As well as losing stuff entirely, you may also end up with overthinking and changing something that was, in hindsight, actually better back at version 1.
We can’t back up externally on the DT yet but this is essential. Snapshotting work at regular intervals is becoming part of my workflow.
Currently you can copy Projects on the DT, but at some point you need a proper backup (CF card on the OT is great in this regard)
If your Machinedrum is a UW, could you do me a favor and have the DT send conditional trigs to the RAM-REC machine please? I think that would be an awesome trick for making the audio coming into the machine so crazy things
Maybe use another track to trigger the RAM-Play track with conditional trigs and do random audio madness.
Just posted this in another thread, but get a good dirty improvisational techno workout in. It’s the most fun I’ve had with my DT thus far. I just had a blast with the following track setup:
Kick
Snare
Lighter, rhythmic kick pattern
Claps with heavy delays
Square, house bass
Wavetable oscillator
Wavetable oscillator
Wavetable oscillator
On a one bar loop jam out small sequences on the wave tables tracks, go nuts with the effects, and use the filters and mutes to fade between them. Add delays to the claps for transitions, use the square bass as a back up line and never stop the sequencer! Goodbye like 4 hours of your night.
Before you know it you will be flying through the machine muting, filtering, changing sample sources, etc.
I think most of the fun stuff is pretty self-explanatory. What I wish I’d figured out sooner:
-the two mute states and switching in & out of them fluently
-how to set up the MIDI tracks (channels, CC commands etc)
-the full possibilities of conditional trigs
I think a lot of things will be more familiar to you as a previous Elektron user than they were to me.
The way the MIDI is set up is fantastic, it gives a lot of control over external gear. unfortunately it’s not completely stable and MIDI in/out still causes me crashes sometimes. The overall advantages are still such that I’ve gone with DT as my primary live box even though I’m shitting myself every time I turn it on that this will be one of its ‘bad hair days’.
First off, my Machinedrum is not the UW so I’m afraid I cannot try that out.
I’ve been experimenting with the device for a day and having great fun; the supplied sounds work really well and compliment the Machinedrum and Analog Four.
The conditional trigs are fabulous and offer great variety; the Analog Four also does this happily. Machinedrum offers that sharp electronic sound that just places everything else. Great combination.
The Digi had locked up twice and was a bugger to upgrade the OS. However, pretty much okay and stable.
plug the midi out of the digitakt into the midi in on the digitakt.
I think that is really fun.
You can create midi tracks for the reverb and delay so that you can use the lfo’s or p locks to create reverb sweeps or mutating patterns.
or you can create a track to trigger two audio tracks at once. lots of possibilities.
Try making an entire song using only one sample!
oh and start really quiet. Its really easy to just go full volume and overdrive on samples. this pretty much drowns out the subtleties of the reverb.
I think what works the best is to set up a semi finished song and slice up to bring into the digitakt. My brain needs either a keyboard or this to get something going that i like. Haven’t done much with creating everything from one sound. Will get to it eventually. What i have been doing is making 2 sets of 4 bars: bass, piano etc, and a couple of padsounds and then the remaining four tracks i use for drums.
also when taking samples, less dynamic variation in your sample will result in more accurate normalization. So basically, only sample the sound that you are trying to capture, otherwise it might be more quiet than you like.
OHHH! I know what you can do with the MD! I did this with the A4/OT/MD…
You set up a midi map for different patterns for different midi notes. You plug in those patterns(I liked setting it up for different sequencer lengths and rate) and then you put an LFO on the midi note being performed on the midi track- and then set up conditional trigs and then you get really spastic random percussion on a pattern level!
Really cool!
(The video kinda builds up to what I’m talking about)
Whoa . . . Shit loads of things to do! Thanks so much. I’ll give so this a whirl. Currently I’m with the Digitakt, glass of wine, headphones and the fire lit. Just fabulous.
understand the differences between sounds , samples , + Drive.
look into the difference pad mute modes
understand how lfo , lfo trig and the different modes can be used , you can do a huge amount of weird stuff once you get to grips with them
understand the unusual trig types , PRE , NEI in particular.
figure out the way that samples can be in a chain , and the values needed for accurately playing the particular sample within the chain so you can easily Plock the values.
tread a little carefully with midi in / midi out , CC controller output etc… its ok , but you may find more bugs in that direction.
understand the file system , the left and right menus , its a little weird but you’ll get the hand of it.
realise that you can type in the folder name in the transfer app (bottom left) , you dont have to import to a randomly defined string.
thats probably it for now.
