Your digitakt setup

How do you like the Beatstep in conjunction with the Digitakt? Do you find they complement each other? I want a Beatstep Pro badly, but not sure I would end up needing it with all the power the Digitakt offers…

Looks neat and tidy to me!

Share it, I do love to hear it!

New live set up with Digitakt and Pisound:


A little messy, and taken from the side, 'cause that’s how I roll…

Pisound (white box on the left) is doing:

  • USB MIDI routing so the faders on the UC44 can control the master volumes on the DT (wish we had the 1.01 behavior where loading a patch didn’t reset the master volumes…)
  • Ableton Link sync, so I’m in sync with my bandmates (and we can all control the tempo)
  • Beat sync’d gate & delay effects
  • Reverb & HP/LP sweeps
  • Mixing all of the above

Orange box w/light is a PBMIX3, battery powered mixer. The fader/knob box is a FaderFox UC44. The red thing with the hexagons is a du-touch S, a French instrument I’m still learning to play.

20 Likes

great setup - similar to mine

I haven’t used the Beatstep Pro with the Digitakt yet. I have been using it for 12 months for xox style sequencing of soft synths. I only got the Digitakt last week.

Thinking about it further the BS Pro does seem a little obsolete now the Digitakt has arrived but I will probably keep it around as it is pretty embedded into my workflow.

1 Like

Love the Lava lamps…

so many beautifully made photographs, i’m completely inspired :slight_smile:

use the BSP with your digitakt! you can do lots of fun stuff that DT doesn’t do on its own.

(for example: you can throw retrig rolls in on the fly. and/or you can have a sweet BSP sequence going and then manually change the tracks on your DT and have your cool sequence playing any of the voices. fun for different timbres of the same sequence.)

I will certainly give it a go when I get chance.

How do you like Pisound? I’m searching in their documentation and forums for an answer…can Pisound act as MIDI host?

This is the type of stuff I’m interested in hearing about!

maybe

I’m loving Pisound! Mind you, you need to be unafraid of mucking in a Linux shell… (though they have a MODEP set up that is pretty turn-key). If a little tinkering with puredata or any or alsa or jack based tools is your thing, it really works.

YES! Any Raspberry Pi is a USB MIDI host right out of the box! The Pi 3 model has 4 USB A jacks, which is plenty. You can just plug in your controller and Digitakt via USB and use any of the available Linux tools for routing MIDI and it just works. Pisound adds two DIN MIDI jacks (1 in, 1 out) to the mix, and you can route freely between them and USB MIDI.

Pisound also adds some great scripts for running the Pi headless: The one button on the Pisound lets you do actions like launch a puredata patch, start WiFi hotspot, or cleanly shutdown the pi. These functions are easily scriptable to do what you want.

10 Likes

I’ve had the UC44 for a year now, and used it extensively. It is really nice to perform with, and is extremely versatile in how you can configure and use it.

Programming it can be done entirely on the unit itself. It isn’t particularly hard, but it is what you might expect: lots of knob turning! There is a learn function. Because there are so many controls to configure (2 banks of 16 faders + 32 buttons, 32 banks of 8 knobs = 352 controls!), configuring a whole setup takes time.

Personally, I reverse engineered the sysex format, and then wrote a bunch of Python scripts that let me layout a setup in a text file - then run the code to generate a sysex dump file. Send that to the UC44 and I’m good. I find this easier, and I can easily rearrange things as I need.

I realize you aren’t using a DAW, but for those that are: The factory setups are pretty useful out of the box - just start mapping controls to your software. If you use Live, there is a special set up for the FaderFox supplied remote script. If you go that route, I wrote a new remote script from scratch, crunch/remote, that improves a number of things - (and can be easily configured for any MIDI controller).

4 Likes

Had the digitakt for about 2 months now. I bought it to replace my electribe mx as my master sequencer and it was the best buy i could do.
It is sequencing now most of my gear.

6 Likes

very cool karl, what may i ask is the yellow keyboard looking so modern and amazing?

after recently buying the Jomox bassdrum machine, and loving it, going to invest in the mBrane to go with and sequence the both from the Digitakt - and from there to a stereo input of OTmkII.

also a machinedrum and korg prophecy through a two track analogue mixer to the other stereo input of the OT.

Looks like it’s a yellow microbrute

1 Like

My computer-less setup…questions welcome!

4 Likes

It is a microbrute, it is not my favourite color but it makes cool sounds so thats alright i guess

1 Like