Back in the day when I was a wee nipper, I had a casio HT-700, my first foray into electronic music. The drum section allowed you to program a specific pattern that would play when you pressed ‘fill’.
With the Digitone, it seems to work differently in that you tell certain notes/trigs to play or not play when you press ‘fill’.
Is there a way to copy an entire pattern into the ‘fill’ page? Or do you have to go through trig by trig, note by note and assign trig/fill conditions?
Or is there a way to tell Digitone to play a certain pattern when I hit ‘fill’?
I probably need to get used to it, but I find the idea of having a program a fill ‘on top of’ a pattern kinda tricky. (if that makes sense!)
Fills have to be embedded within a pattern’s steps - so it’s an alternative that needs to be on non playing steps - there’s no other conceptual use cases, it’s a way to get hidden steps to appear (and also to get Not Fill) steps which play ordinarily to vanish.
All TRCs only toggle on and off existing Trigs, it’s completely binary
Yes, fills on Elektrons are a way to alter a pattern (play additional trigs or silence trigs that normally play), but you can ofc use a different pattern as fill in.
The Digitone doesn’t have Direct Jump (immediately change pattern, pattern continues to play from the next step) and Direct Start (immediately change pattern, next pattern plays from step 1 - A4/AK and AR have them) modi afaik, but Digitone has ‘Change Length’ - you could set the pattern change length to 16 steps so the pattern doesn’t have to play completely through, the pattern change would be executed at the end of the next 16 steps.
This setting is in the scale menu, length per track mode, ‘CH.LEN’ parameter.
(Digitone pdf manual, page 37)
If you treat each bank as a ‘song’, you could reserve the last two patterns in a bank (15 and 16) for fill ins.
You just have to pay attention to the scale menz settings, best to have it similar across all patterns, so when you execute a pattern change, you know it will always behave in the same way.
This would basically give you the classic ‘fill a/b’ functionality.
Don’t use the fill condition myself. I just make a note of when I want a fill and use a conditional trig like 4/4 or something. Then I don’t have to press the button combo, its just automatic. After my 4/4 type fill triggers, I’m typically moving on to the next pattern in the bank. I see the usefulness of the fill feature, just doesn’t work for me personally. Good to have though.
As said above, it’s basically a trig by trig parameter setting.
One thing though: you may press several trigs and adjust the same parameter for all the trigs pressed at once.
You can also copy and paste a trig, or a parameter page.
These functionalities should accelerate the workflow a bit…
but keep in mind it will ‘offset’ current values, it won’t lock all to the seen (first held) dialled value (unless you go full scale and overshoot either way and then position the desired value, then they’ll be the same)
Apologies, I meant 4:4. Not time signature related. Also being able to adjust multiple parameters at once is great. It took me some time to realize that one. Much quicker!