Digitakt Bubble: Already set to Burst? 04/15/23

Out of curiosity, what are you wanting to make with it? The DT update has been the thing that finally made breakbeat chopping make sense to me and opened up a whole world of music.

2 Likes

I make boring boom bap hip-hop. So I sample a lot of stuff from records. A lot of it is uneven pieces or loops where the musicians werenā€™t playing exactly on time. In those kind of cases the slice machine might as well not be there.

Yeah, Iā€™ve seen folks get pretty crazy with those break loops. And Im glad yā€™all are enjoying it.

3 Likes

Ah yeah, the slice machine definitely wonā€™t do that very well. Anything off the grid or swing gets weird with the slice machine. Love me some boom bap though :okej:

2 Likes

have fun being [Elektron] poor

1 Like

As someone that has a Digitakt listed just over $700, if you look at new prices in the US which are all at $899, that seems reasonable for a mint specimen.

I think people are used to $550 to $650 but those used prices are from units probably bought before the last two official price increases. It would be silly to sell used at those prices now unless the unit is heavily aged, or worn perhaps.

Generally 70-80% new is acceptable for decent condition used gear. At least thatā€™s been my experience over the past 2+ decades.

I do like to occasionally cut really good deals for things though. So itā€™s definitely relative to whatever the situation is.

3 Likes

I think Guitar Center is only concerned with what they paid for it on trade in and what they consider to be the market value, for them itā€™s probably a bottom line of profit margin. Of course a privately listed DT of a known provenance will likely also be in superior condition.

1 Like

True. Definitely a range of situations to consider.

Iā€™ve definitely sold my share of $600 Digis, that I then re-bought new again at the going rate :smiley:

1 Like

At the end of the day itā€™s not just one factor that determines price, synth gear (especially elektron gear) has a abnormally good resale. Remaining warranty has a value to factor in. Also, I sometimes call and ask places like GC for additional pictures because very often the last person using the item was eating a pack of glazed donuts at the time and it is helpful to discern this kind of thing ahead of time.

1 Like

Def, peopleā€¦ just talk to others, be cool!

I had someone recently try to whittle me down over and over with a Craigslist keyboard recently.

I ended up selling it for much more on Reverb.

Funny thing is that i wouldā€™ve probably wouldā€™ve straight up given it to the initial person if they had talked about their music or made some plea based on something other than wasting my time, not meeting up, ignoring stated price and asking me to go down past what itā€™d take for me to just keep it as a backup or use it for what it is.

I know thereā€™s been occasions where someone responds to a plea and the person sees their keyboard flipped on eBay after, eh. Iā€™d rather not worry about that. And that shtick is pretty obvious as well.

Iā€™m fine with giving instruments to people who really need it to get established, but if youā€™re not going to get to the point, waste my time and ignore the days i set up as good to meet up, phbbbbbbt.

2 Likes

Honestly, it would do it just fine if they could implement a time stamp as opposed to / in addition to the 120 divisions of a sample that is the present measurement, thereā€™s too much air in front of a visible wave to know how much transient sound youā€™re losing - also in resampling a drum loop, I feel like if the first hit is a kick, you lose the attack on the first kick to the gate even if the fixed recording length helps get a loopable result. Itā€™s an imperfect machine, but generally, Iā€™m happier with what it offers than that which it doesnā€™t.

1 Like

Ok I thought I was hallucinating when I noticed this yesterday. Sad to know it really happens, glad to know Iā€™m not losing it (yet).

1 Like

While that SHOULDNā€™T happen, maybe resample two bars and cut the first. Definitely shouldnā€™t cut what probably amounts to 3-5 ms attack phase, but that would be my suggestion. L

Iā€™ve never actually resampled internally, so Iā€™m not an expert there. When I sample itā€™s external signals, or I just load in samples,

Honestly though, on the takt, Iā€™m generally doing some form of digital synthesis rather than true sample work.

2 Likes

This actually just happened to me, in order to not have to Plock everything to one track, I built up a hip hop kick line of varying velocities and envelopes, tuned slightly differently from each other over 3 tracks, made from a sound I sampled externally and then more or less turned that into a kick drum sound using the DTā€™s sound shaping. I started the project at double the bpm that I wanted, so it would be easier to place some double kick hits and get the velocities the way I wanted but it played back at the way you would expect it to if the project were at half the speed and thus took 128 bars (2 pattern lengths) to make a 64 bar loop. I had to resample that to a project at half the speed of the original loop and then slice everything into 64 steps set out over a linear grid, so unfortunately there wasnā€™t a way to cut anything and have it play back correctly. My original intent was just to redo everything with Plocks but it would have been such a headache to go back through and redo it in the half tempo project I decided to just use the resample/slice and thatā€™s when I started to notice the gating issue. I usually just build beats out of one shots so itā€™s not an issue, but with the fixed grid and resampling, fwiw, it was kinda finnicky. Still, Iā€™d rather have it than not have it, itā€™s just something that you live with in the imperfect world paradigm.

2 Likes

Just to follow up on some of these shenanigans, I did a real world test by recording directly out of the machine with my ā€œgate recorded resampled sliced up loopā€ and the results are a bit unpleasant when viewed without the rose colored glasses which I like to wear when I look at my digitakt.

Here is the wave of 2 kicks back to back midway through the progression:


here are 2 kicks at the loop point where it goes back to the gated kick:

This is what it is like, staring into the eyes of a killer (of kick drums):
image

I hate to say it, but this is a very poor result. Worse than I expected. Good thing my hearing is shit otherwise I might hear something I really donā€™t like somewhereā€¦

Anyways Iā€™m not going to start a new thread and cry about it, but for some sounds (kicks) I might have to go back to parameter locks and work arounds like Doug (who probably has better hearing than I do) was probably rational in deciding was the best option. No judgement about Elektron, digitakt or anyones personal methods but this is just my findings after our little talk.

5 Likes

Nerd!!!

image

1 Like

If you think thatā€™s bad, you should try AR-909 on iOS

1 Like

Just bought One for 550 eur on reverb After 2 Years without One. It took me 2 years to realize that the ā€œbest musicā€ Iā€™ve ever made was written with this little black box.
I firstly bought one in 2019 for 669, now Is listed at 910 on Thomann. Wow.

4 Likes

Oh man. What do you think is causing this?

1 Like

I think itā€™s the feature that lets you use threshold to record, so that it can accurately measure a recording length of X number steps. When you arm the recorder, itā€™s triggered by the threshold to start. Iā€™m going to try it again and make sure I have the threshold set at maximum 0 and see if thereā€™s any change. Itā€™s possible however that the issue is just that the gate (threshold) isnā€™t sensitive enough to pick up something which is only barely audible to human ears anyways. A click when a waveform ends early is audible, but the subtle part of a kick drum attack can be lost almost silently because it has nothing to tell you itā€™s there except the waveform shown after the fact or your feeling that you hear something indistinctly missing. Iā€™m working on something with the same project, when I update the recording, Iā€™ll update the post if the results change.

If you had 4 arms or 2 people, you could have one person press yes to record while the other (in sync) presses play and because you are still using fixed length recording, you might end up with a less truncated result, but itā€™s certainly a complicated way of going about it.

2 Likes