Chopping samples while using the time stretch trick on the Digitakt (A tutorial)

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

Hey y’all,

This is my first stab at this kind of video. I think I’ve got a pretty good trick to share though. Building off of @dialectrics great video about easy time stretching, I figured out how to parameter lock the phase of the LFO to chop the sample while keeping the time stretch effect going. I think it’s pretty cool.

Here’s the how to. I’ve done my best to explain it in the video. But like I was saying, this is my first real stab at something like this after warming up with my walkthrough on the Loopop contest thing.

Here are the notes:

  1. Find the midpoint of the section that you want to loop. Set that as your sample’s start point. (If you’re looping the entire sample, your midpoint is 60.)
  2. Set your LFO’s wave to saw. Set your speed to 8. Set your LFO destination to sample start.
  3. If you want to loop 1 bar, your multiplier is 16. If you want to loop 2 bars, your multiplier is 8. And if you want to loop 4 bars, your multiplier is 4.
  4. Your LFO depth is the distance between the the midpoint and the start of your loop. It must be negative. (If you’re looping your whole sample, the distance between your start point (0) and your midpoint (60) is 60. And therefore your LFO depth is -60)
  5. For 1 bar loops, moving a quarter note in the loop means a change of 32 in the LFO’s phase. For 2 bar loops, that’s 16. And for 4 bar loops, that’s 8.
  6. Lock the phase parameter and set the LFO to trigger on steps where you would like to chop your sample. Set regular trigs everywhere else. Or don’t. You can leave them empty and experiment with the shuffle.
  7. The phase values are based on how long your loop is. Moving from step 1 to 5 (or a quarter note) means that the phase has changed by 32 for a 1 bar loop, by 16 for a 2 bar loop, and by 8 for a 4 bar loop.
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#2

Nice dude love this!

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#3

Great work man. I love how this community is finding new gems and techniques for this awesome machine.

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#4

Excellent!

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#5

Yeah definitely. I really like that the Digitakt is wide open enough that you can set it to do something like this that it wasn’t at all designed to do. And I love how we’re all still figuring it out as we go and building off of each other.

Also to go back to the discussion of sample slicing on the Digitakt generally that we were all having, I think that this trick could work out pretty well just for sample slicing.

Even if your sample isn’t a loop, setting this up gives you a basic grid and to the extent that you’ve got the numbers for the phase in your head you can quickly access points on that grid without even needing to look at the waveform. And if you don’t need the timestretch effect then you don’t necessarily need the trigs between chops and you can mess with the shuffle.

I’m going to probably get into this in a follow up

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#6

Great one thanks a bunch! I hadn’t yet tried the timestretching one, and this chopping on top of it is superbe!

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#7

Dude you nailed it with this vid!! i hadn’t thought of using the phase like like that before that’s super clever.

The cool thing is that you can drop another 4 bar loop into the track you made and your chops still work because it’s based on divisions of the bar not specific start points of a sample.

Kudos man

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#8

I’ve made another little video on this focusing on just the sample chopping aspect of this.

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#9

Nice !
Thanks for the explanaition.
Waiting for your next video!

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#10

Thanks man, very useful!

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