Hi there, been using the Digitakt for two months now. It’s my first piece of music production gear. I love how it’s enabling me to make beats/drum sequences really easy. But when I try to take it a step further, I get stranded. I just can’t manage to make decent sounds/synths (deep basses, freaky sounds) and get stuck with the same result when playing with oscillators and lfo.
Is it my lack of experience or is the Digitakt limited in this area (synthesis) and should I just go for the Digitone as well?
Its more drum, short sample orentated but like almost every elektron device, sequencer is magical and you can find purpose what fits you, just learn it inside out, outside in and be open to your flow.
Well, it is a sampler. Maybe try sampling sounds closer to what you are trying to achieve. I think the filter is pretty good, and I have had good results using it as a synth. I think it just depends what type of sounds you are loading It with.
You can actually take any piece of a sample as an oscillator, maybe try to change your source first.
Use both LFOs and use plocks on them, envelopes and velocity, and you should get plenty of modulations to make your sounds more alive.
FM rate LFO in particular can completely change the base sound.
You might also consider a small mono that you pilot from DT MIDI track if you really need more guts in your bass. My own favorite lately has been the Typhon, but cheap monosynths are legion.
Yea, for example I just made simple saw dub techno chord in ableton with no filter, loaded in digitakt with many drum, perc and texture samples and I can make dub techno album. Just learn to be comfortable with dt. It’s simple but you can make alot with it.
Have you attempted some fm or am synthesis with the Lfo’s yet?
A single cycle waveform and an audio rate lfo that modulates the frequency of the sample is fun to tune and play on the keyboard.
If you want to get complicated with it you could copy the same instrument to each track and then tune each track to a note in a scale.
Poly fm DT
I think this is the most fun part of the DT to me.
It’s ability to create a makeshift version of most other instruments.
Try recording your synth lines through the compressor with some extreme settings too. It’s the digitakt’s only envelope follower type of feature. It works really well with external gear to change the whole sound.
Stick a high pass filter on the source sound, bump the resonance quite high (try between 32 and 64 for starters) then adjust frequency cutoff to where it really pushes the fundamental frequency of your bass sample.
Stick LFOs (even p-locked to certain notes or parts of the sequence) on things like bitcrush, frequency, tune, etc etc. Experiment!
There are a lot of waveforms in the factory samples on digitakt , I’d you dig into synthesis and understand how things work you’ll get some nice mono noises.
Digitakt is a great sampler for the price and a second rate synth. Focusing on the synth and trying to make magic for that aspect will only lead to disappointment. Grab some samples, manipulate them until they are amazing, and if you need some simple synth sounds to finish up the track it will do it.
Since they updated the signal path to process external audio, perhaps take a break from sampling for a short stint to just process sounds with the available tools.
In some ways, the sound shaping tools are limited and lend themselves to beats and rhythmic elements. But a deep dive into those options (without specific sounds in mind) has yielded some amazing material for me in the past.
If you ever get your hands on one of those old Yamaha PSS sound blaster synths (or even just lift some material from youtube), do yourself a favor and sample some brass and hit it with the bitcrusher, the overdrive, and then the filter. Then LFO, delay, P-lock, etc.
I promise you that there is an infinite world of killer sounds in there. You just have to be determined to access it.
If you aren’t resampling you won’t get very far crafting sounds that don’t start pretty to close to what you were looking for in the first place.
I really like Legowelt’s free vintage synth sample packs. All the sounds are good starting points, they are all one shots. Dry (no fx), simple, classic type patches you can take in many directions. Also, the sounds are all more or less a C note/root note so you don’t have to worry about tuning them.
Likewise, I will output my DAW into the DIgitakt so I can capture my own synth patches. Again–I get them close to what I want in the first place, then polish them off/use filters and FX on the DT as performance tools on a finished sound.
Holy shit people! I woke up this morning, finding tons of notification mails regarding this post! Thanks a lot! I’ll check all of your tips and try stuff out!
Quick question: some of you tell me to start out with quality samples. I have often looked at Native Instrument sample libraries. Would this be overkill, since you’re not using DAW-dependent features? And if so, what are quality sample libraries? I’m not looking for free/cheap. Looking for quality.
When I start out a track I’m not sure what I’m looking for :-)! I’d like to coincidentally create stuff I like. You know what I mean? Except for fat basses and stuff like that.
