Yeah, that’s why I didn’t elaborate much and jumped to my personal solutions/ workarounds for it. I know that it’s both a pipe dream and something that wouldn’t work with the current physical and software UI, I just forgot to explicitly make that statement. While I often run into cases where it would be more convenient to have more steps, I get by just fine, ultimately, with 64 and trig conditions/ plocks/ pattern changes.
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“easily”? That sounds like a big bump in parts cost alone. Some people were already put off by Syntakt being £150 more expensive than the other Digis. Such a device would have to be bigger. Plus it’d be a new form factor (Elektron customers seem divided on whether the mkii Analogs were a good idea as it is)…
I don’t think any of this is “easy”.
It might be good (I rather like the sound of that 32-button interface)… but these are BIG questions for Elektron to answer.
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I’ve run into this problem too recently. One possible way to alleviate it is to move the other track trigs (the we ones that are already on the grid) ahead or behind one tick to compensate. It obviously works better with some percussion sounds than others, but it can get rid of that subtle difference between notes that makes things sound “off”.
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You know, I hadn’t even thought of that but it’s a damn good idea for certain sounds/patterns. Knock it ‘off’ a tick, record everything, then push it back in post for the final master.
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Or a lot of times percussive elements sound better slightly off-time. That’s what real drummers do.
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I wouldn’t let Elektron off that easily - buttons are cheap plus they could be made smaller (like the Digitone ones just turned sideways). I guess the main reason Elektron hasn’t done it is workflow/legacy.
They could use the 4 leds to show the bar number in binary – that gives you 16 bars, or 256 steps. And they could have “extended mode” as a setting in the pages setup. Probably the easiest way to implement it, if a little inelegant.
I find using chains to be sufficient, though, at least on the big boxes.
They could add support for 256 steps … Hold page button and press a trig key to go straight to the desired page 1-16 … Even better hold page button and press play and play from the current page …
Pretty sure they’re storing trigs as arrays so they’d have to drastically rework the sequencer, something they have not done in decades…
Long-as-hell patterns would help on those boxes without kits … AR, A4, OT, MD, MM don’t really need it.
We’re talking about something that will never happen though
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Anything more than 64 steps would need a huge overhaul of the UI to avoid becoming an overcomplicated mess. I can’t think of a single solution on the current UI that isn’t more complicated/annoying than just chaining a few patterns and messing with track scales.
128 steps works really well on something like the tracker, where the visual interface allows you to scroll around and easily see where you are in the loop. Can you imagine having to keep track of 16 pages of trigs on a Digitakt?
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