DT and DN synced but at different tempo or scale?

Elektron Gear Digitone/Digitone Keys
#1

Hi all, my first time here.

I’ve got a DT, and I am considering adding a DN to it, but have this question. So could you either, assuming DT is the master : have the DT still command pattern change on the DN, but having however different tempo setting on both units (I guess that would involve, if possible at any rate- unchecking clock send/receive, but still enabling pr ch send/receive in the Sync menu)

or

have them properly synced, but having a different scale on each machine ? I suppose you’ll then need to adjust the ch. lenght parameter to a value that equals them on both machines, so that patterns stil change together. But is it possible ?

thanks !

#2

If you disable send/receive clock I believe that you will be disabling transport as well, so don’t do that.

You can definitely have one machine playing on a different scale than the other. Probably the easiest way to keep everything synced up is to adjust change lengths. It just may take a little bit of math.

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#3

Thanks. That could somehow circumvent the lack of scale per track on the DT. Having the DT sequecing say beats at some fast or regular scale, while the DN runs at eg half scale and plays some chord progression or melody. Plus, I guess you could still do speedy stuff on some DN tracks, using the arp at higher speeds.

#4

with conditional trigs you can add variation to the regular scaled dt patterns as well to avoid getting stuck in repetition while the “longer” pattern plays out on the dn.

2 Likes
#5

Yes there’s a lot of room for that !

#6

(Hi, warning : long message !)

So…I now have a DN, to play along with my DT. And – concerning what is at stakes here – it is not doing so well. Before reporting these as bugs, I’d like to have some feedback, maybe I’m missing somehing. Also this concerns both units obviously.

I’m not sending program changes manually, just using the automatic sync feature.

Regular pattern sync works as expected. By regular I mean when all the scale page settings on both units are the same.

Except :

1° When the slave unit (for this I’ve tried both ways, DT>DN as well as DN>DT, same behavior) has its m. lenght set to INF, it jumps to the desired pattern with a cycle delay (of course, ch. Lenght is set in a meaningfull way). It seems a bug because I can see no reason why. This does not occur when the master in set on INF, only the slave (be it DN or DT). It’s not dramatic, but it means no polyrhythm on the slave, basically, at least if you want to sync pattern changes…

Now :

2° Let’s set both DT (master) and DN (slave) to a 32 steps patterns, but let’s set the ch. lenght for both at 16. If I ask for a pattern change in the first half of the pattern, the DT changes after step 16, as expected…but the DN still wants to accomplish the whole 32 steps, despite its ch.lenght set at 16. Again, seems buggy to me. It is as if, for the slave, the ch.lenght parameter was ignored and mirrored the pattern lenght whatsoever.

Finally :

3° To the case where different scale (proper) settings are desired. My idea was to have the DT running at x1, and the DN running at x1/2 (both, say, 32 steps patterns. Both ch.lenght set at 32). It is messy. Here’s what happens. If I ask for the pattern change while the DN is still in the first half of it’s cycle, it will correctly change pattern at the end of it’s pattern. Of course, this is not very interesting because the DT pattern logically changes at the middle of the DN pattern (I thought of a workaround for that, but it failed, a word about it later). But, if you ask for the pattern change while the DN pattern has entered the second half of its cycle (what seems the most natural), the DN will unfortunately not change pattern before another full cycle is accomplished. So it’s no good.

The failed workaround :

I thought I could ask for the pattern change in the first half of the cycle (though it’s not very natural), and maybe set the ch.length on the DT to 64, so that it cycles two whole times before changing, synced with the DN. But it doesn’t work : the changes occurs after the 32 steps (the pattern lenght), no matter waht. I guess its logical because the unit doesn’t « count » the number of cycles it has accomplished, so it probably cannot know that it has to change after, say, two cycles. But if that’s so, what’s the meaning of the possibility to go to very high values, in the ch.lenght setting ? Nothing above 64 seems useful – but I may be missing something here.

Voilà !
I’d be curious to know if other users can confirm these problems – or, even better, show me where I am wrong.

cheers

#7

Not addressing the whole post cause I don’t have the machines in front of me at the moment.

For pattern scaling if you set the ch. length on both machines to the same ch length but different scales the change will be off. So say the dt has a pattern that is 32 steps with a ch. length of 32 a normal scale 1x and the dn has the same except at 1/2 speed. Technically at half scale you are setting the dn for a 64 step ch. length. In relation to the dt at normal scale.

About counting cycles. There has to be some sort of cycle count that the machines keep track of because of conditional trigs. Trigs like 1:4, 1:2, 3:4 only trig on certain cycles of the sequencer. The extended ch. length can be then utilized to make sure the pattern makes it through all its conditionals before changing.

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#8

Yes you’re obviously right about counting cycles, it does…

Otherwise yes I did try to do the math correctly, ie changing ch. length accordingly to the scale difference, but that didn’t work, that’s what surprised me. Maybe when you have a chance to give it a try, you’ll figure out how do this right, but I really felt something was just wrong.

A general workaround would be to always have the “slower” unit sequencing the other. This way, it works fine, but it’s a bit of a limitation.