Digitakt Sketch #54 Haven’t Used The Digitakt In a While (November 24th 2020)
I haven’t used the Digitakt in a while. It feels weird now that I’ve gotten so used to the Digitone’s layout. I still very much prefer how the Digitakt handles mutes and track selection
As usual, all audio is coming from the Digitakt, with a bit of saturation and compression added in post using the plugins Phoenix and Maximus respectively. Everything was recorded in one take, no overdubbing.
Octatrack Sketch #6 There Was an Update (December 8th 2020)
I’ve been struggling with the Octatrack for a long time. Not long ago there was an update that added two things I sorely needed: trig+yes to preview sounds, and multiple trig editing. It would have been impossible to sequence the beat on this track without either of those!
I thought I’d try a different approach this time. I made a little arp in FL Studio, made it repeat a bunch of times and slowly increased the intensity of it. I sampled that into the Octatrack and sliced it up into 8 or 9 slices, each slice playing the same arp but at various intensities. From here I used the fader to choose which slice to play; further to the right means higher intensity.
Then I sampled one bass note slowly getting more intense across 32 notes, sliced that into 32 slices, and did the same trick.Then again for the violins, but this time adding a 5th near the end of it. This way I could choose how intense the track would be just by moving the fader.
Haha, I just popped it out with a guitar pick. They’re a bit hard to pry loose and it feels like they’ll break, but I’ve done it a bunch of times on my DT, DN and OT already without any problems. YMMV!
I used a Fender “medium” pick and it gently removed the buttons with medium pressure. This is a nice change of pace. The DN looks so sleek and unassuming now and the OT finally has a little character.
Octatrack Sketch #7 High Place With Little Sound (December 10th 2020)
I’m still trying to get used to the Octatrack. Having used the Digitakt and Digitone for so long, the Octatrack requires a very different approach and I have to relearn a bunch of things I’ve taken for granted. What I did for this track was to open FL Studio and an instance of Toxic Biohazard (my favorite FM synth), load up a few of my old home made patches, then sample some meandering chords into the Octatrack. Each track was set to Flex machine and used their corresponding sample buffers. I sampled a bunch of different sounds into all the buffers, and as soon as I was happy with them I saved all of them to disk to stay safe. I’ve lost a lot of progress by forgetting to save the sample buffers!
Coming up with useful scenes is harder than I expected. My go-to scenes are the unsubtle filter sweep ones, but I think I managed to make a couple of nice scenes that work well together. I’m gonna need more practice keeping track of mutes, pattern selection and scene selection.
I’ve always preferred your DT / DN pieces over your earlier OT stuff - but perhaps this time the OT has contributed something more concrete (i.e not just wobbly mashupery) to what you’re doing. Impressive as ever.
Thank you @badbass and @MK7! I still haven’t gotten past the filter sweepy crossfader stage yet. I’m not patient enough to just let the tracks play without being faded between this scene and that
I’m gonna put more time into the Octatrack now that I’m not struggling with inputting trigs thanks to the 1.40 update
Digitakt Sketch #55 Chooms and Eddies (December 23rd 2020)
I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 lately, and was inspired to try playing my guitar and bass with heavy distortion. The music near the end of the game was so good that I played through it multiple times with the guitar in my lap and played along on several parts.
I wanted to try making something that would fit the montage-style cutscenes in the game, and I had a lot of fun with the hammy guitar solo in the middle
The guitar is a Squier telecaster and the bass is a Squier VM 70s Jazz Bass with really old flatwound strings on it. For FX I’m using this really old software called Gearbox that came with my TonePort UX2 from maybe 2007.
Everything is recorded in one take, no overdubs. I added a preamp plugin (Phoenix) and multiband expander (Maximus) in post for a bit of saturation and to even out the levels a bit.
Last upload of 2020! I tried using my Digitone as the main sample source for this track. I picked out a handful of patches I like on the Digitone, ran them through the Octatrack’s filter and compressor to crunch it up, then sampled the results and chopped them up and arranged them into a full pattern. It’s a bit of a tedious workflow, but I think I’ll get a lot more comfortable and faster with practice.
The function key too!? I didn’t notice that was there before
I think your octatrack sketches are taking on a unique direction. Really interesting use of scenes and performative parameter changes that makes rewatching fun.
Like in the last track, I used the Digitone as sample fodder for the Octatrack. Track 7 was a pickup machine I used to live record a handful of loops for later slicing and rearranging. The bassline was actually the result of a bunch of mistakes I made while using the pickup machine, then randomly placing trigs with random start points in the loop. Then I saved the sample and continued sampling the Digitone into more loops.
The timing of each loop is slightly different from each other. I didn’t notice the Octatrack autodetect the “correct” tempo each time I used the pickup machine. I didn’t like how the time stretching sounds on the Octatrack, so I disabled it and had to rearrange them to ge the timing correct again.
I like how easy it is to make everything dense and heavy on the Octatrack, even if it makes mixing a lot harder for me. I’m so used to the Digitakt and Digitone’s huge headroom even with all the volume knobs at max. On the Octatrack I have to dial everything down to give myself more room to work with.
I usually sequence all my melodies step by step, but I tried making my melodies differently this time. I used a midi keyboard and played my orchestral sample library which I got in the mid 2000s (East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra). I had 4 flex tracks and played a random set of notes from violins, cellos and double bass, then sliced up those 4 samples and mixed and matched them to create a fun texture. I then resampled it into one sample, then further sliced and rearranged that. Finally, I live recorded the violin melody playing on top of that.
This way of making music is really strange to me, and I had a hard time coming up with a B-section. When I sequence everything note by note, I can just copy-paste the pattern and move notes around to create new chord progressions. When sampling random notes and rearranging them, the new chords I make all derive from the notes in the samples, making it hard to completely change things up.
This is a pretty short and repetitive track, but I was happy enough with how it ended up that I made a video. I have a bit more experience with the Octatrack now, at least
