Im about to cop the DT. Long time comin. My main purpose is just to have a fun/inspriational tool layin around to help me mangle samples in new ways I can’t/wouldn’t think to do with my current setup (Maschine MK3). I’ve been on the Maschine for awhile and I dont plan on abandoning it. I do however, want to run the two together in whatever ways I can. I have some ideas but thats mostly why I’m here: to see what you all suggest. One possible idea I just had tonight was to add some shaker from the Digi into my Maschine project. To accomplish the idea I have in mind though, I would need the DT to be in complete synch with my Maschine project (In other words, when i press play on Maschine the Digitakt plays back whats goin on inside itself at the same tempo. That way I could sample whats being played on the DT at my project tempo into the Maschine. Would this be possible to do?
wouldn’t just having the digitakt at the same tempo as the maschine project, then sampling the audio from the digitakt into maschine work? If your shaker doesn’t start right at the downbeat you can just shift the sample to start wherever it is supposed to start…
I have the digitakt and the MK3 but seldom use them together at the same time. I either write on the digitakt or write on maschine and bring the results to Ableton and there I might use the other if needed using either overbridge or the maschine vst.
Set Digitakt to USB midi mode in the USB config, and connect to your computer . Send midi clock and transport to it and make sure it’s set to receive those. Done
From my experience, Maschine as MIDI Master is not reliable. The MIDI jitter you get from Maschine is worst than DT. I would put DT as Master and Maschine as slave
My 2 cents
Not even talking about OB in Maschine: forget it.
Not having a Maschine MK3 but Maschine Studio alongside other HW including DT I think altogether is not a smooth workflow.
Either I use solely the Maschine with Maschine Software or I use all my other stuff with Ableton. But in latter case Maschine almost always is left out because the Maschine Software as a plugin inside of Ableton does not give me gratification. I get annoyed by having more or less to arrange twice and then having everything on one Ableton track. If i do I bounce Maschine loops / stems quickly to audio and work from there in Ableton. But this feels workaround-ish.
So, yes, what you intend to do would be possible, but a) I doubt it would do the DT justice and b) I would not be happy with that workflow. The two machines are really great but getting them to interact with each other is not due to software restrictions. Just my opinion …
Maschine can send midi clock to the Digitakt. And Maschine can also be slaved to midi clock from the Digitakt. Both work great.
In the Maschine preferences (midi->sync) you can set a clock offset to compensate for monitoring audio and/or recording into the Maschine. In my experience Maschine is really good at following midi clock. You can set the offset both negative and positive and in send clock you can (of course) only set the offset to negative values.
When it comes to jaming and trying out ideas midi clock sync works great. When it comes to recording and taking stuff to the next step I personally think the Maschine workflow is about sampling audio and then turning the external gear off.
I don’t really see any need for using Overbridge plug-in inside of Maschine. I can imagine it would behave like an elephant in an elevator with audio latency compensation and USB bandwidth bla bla bla and what not. But if you’re into things like that why not. For me it gets to complex and feels more like a science experiment with me shouting things like “this could work” and “great scott!!” at the same time as my inspiration to play and make music completely dies.
As @L4rs3rik said, you can make use one a midi Master/slave using midi clock.
But I would like to add that you can do 2 other things to improve the workflow :
Set digitakt to send and receive program changes (PC), and do the same for maschine (in digitakt it is the midi sync menu, in maschine it is edit > midi change, select program change and channel 10). This way scenes from maschine and patterns from digitakt will be linked and will change together ! you can now change scene/pattern on either on maschine or DT, and the other device will do the same automatically . For convience, set maschine default pattern lenght to 1 bar and auto-growing pattern, and in the perform grid choose retrigger and scene.
create a group in maschine with each sounds on its midi own channel and send every one of them to digitakt. Now you can play digitakt with nice pads and arp
By the way, I am using both maschine and OB inside reaper.
If you send the reaper clock to DT and set OB vst to “no sync” it works perfectly.
The only downside is that playback must not be trigged by DT but by the computer.
wouldn’t just having the digitakt at the same tempo as the maschine project, then sampling the audio from the digitakt into maschine work? If your shaker doesn’t start right at the downbeat you can just shift the sample to start wherever it is supposed to start…
