Hi Elektronauts,
I just got an arturia keystep 37, and wowee, it is fun.
I’m noticing one problem in how it plays with the digitone, which is that it only catches one or two notes of a strum (i.e. you’re in chord mode on the arturia, you want it to play a 6 note chord, and it’s supposed to advance one note at a time through all those six notes).
I think I notice that it’s only catching the first or second note; any thoughts about why that might be the case?
By “catching” do you mean recording on the sequencer, or playing live?
Yep. Its just the way the elektron sequencer works. You can turn quantise off, that will help a bit , but wont replicate your playing perfectly.
Or, you’ve eaten all the voices on the digitone.
It could be that the strum is just too fast for the Elektron sequencer. Imagine trying to program that strum directly, for example. You would need 6 steps to replicate it and I bet it wouldn’t be possible to microtime step 6 back far enough to how you’re hearing it out of the KeyStep. If the strum is more widely spaced (i.e., playing each consecutive note at a slower rate), does the DN manage to play all 6 notes just fine?
I think that the more I slow things down, the more the sequencer picks it up; however, (a.) :< and (b.) I feel like it is still missing 10% of the corded notes. I am recording in unquantized; are there any other settings to manipulate in order to get it close? I think I would be OK recording in my crazy 20 notes strums live so that ableton would be able to pick it up, but it would be nice if I could get the unit in more sync for the less crazy stuff.
You could double the tempo of DN to increase the resolution of what’s being recorded. Then obviously space out other elements to match the original tempo. For example, if you had a kick on 1, 5, 9, 13, use two pages with a kick on 1, 9, 17, 25. I think that you are hitting the limits of what can be recorded as separate events. As each note needs it’s own step it the Elektron world (aside from stacked notes/chords all playing at the exact same time), it can’t play them all back correctly. The exact same thing happens when I live record rapid snare rolls on Rytm, for example. But then again, Rytm has retriggers for that kinda thing.
Isn’t this the limitation of the Elektron sequencers that they are limited to 16 steps per “page”? In other words, you’re running into that limitation here.
Luckily the Keystep has its own excellent sequencer so you could just sequence this part from there instead and effectively have it play live on the Digitone.