Your full track arrangement tricks?

Elektron Gear Digitakt
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Hi guys, for those of you that arrange full tracks on digitakt and try to produce most of it dawless, what are your tricks for making interesting arrangements with various sections?

I’m specifically curious how you might make long flowing intros or breakdowns with the 8 bar loop constraint? Like if I want to have a slow evolving pad overlayed with some rhythmic elements how can I stretch it out to be 32 bars for example? I realize I can change the time scale but then if you have anything that needs to play 8th or 16th notes how would you achieve that? I guess resampling them is one way but I was wondering if there are other ways?

Also what are your tricks for doing transition effects, risers, builds, etc?

I’m mostly doing more energetic dance genres in the 120-140 BPM range but any tips are welcome. I’m trying to do an much of the track out of the box before working on it in Ableton.

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Use lots of patterns; chain them together or use song mode.1

Use different scales per track, and trig conditions so the fast bits only play at positions that match up with the slow bits. Or use Fill to nanually trigger the fast bits.

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Thanks, great ideas :slight_smile:

So it’s possible to have one track play at a 4x slower speed while the rest play a 16 bar loop at the original tempo? The slowed down track won’t restart after it’s through only one quarter of the way? I haven’t tried this on Digitakt 2 yet but I remember trying it on syntakt and it would restart

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You need to go to page menu (func+page) and change to per track mode (func + yes) , then make sure ‘reset’ is set to infinite (scroll to 0). Also make sure ch.len is set to anything other than off (preferably the length you want the pattern to play before going the next triggered pattern).

For longer sounding patterns use a combination of trig conditions, sequencer scale, multiple patterns in kit perform mode. You can also achieve the effect of long evolving sounds with very slow lfos. Use lock trigs (the yellow ones you add by holding func in grid recording mode) to determine when an lfo should reset (by using the lfo.t setting on the trig page ) and give that lock trig a condition to only trigger once every x times

Cheers !

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Thanks so much for the tips :), didn’t think of the LFO trick.

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Oh and don’t forget your hands. Pretty awesome mod sources right at the end of your arms.

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