Live set strategies

Elektron Gear Digitakt
#1

Hi

I’m working on a live set and have two questions:

  1. Do you guys have an entire set worked out in one project (instant switch, might be cramped with sample time) or one project per “song”? If in separate projects, do you find the loading time problematic?

  2. If I start with preparing each “song” in separate projects, is it possible to merge (sample data and sequence data) into a single project later on?

#2

Definitely put your whole set in only one project!
Loading a new project live isn’t a very good idea. It takes time and you may have trouble starting it in sync with whatever you have playing to fill the (silent) gap inbetween loading projects on the DT.
Also: Where is your master-clock coming from?

Merging projects is impossible afaik (I do not use overbridge, so might be wrong on that part), but you may use elkherd to reorganize patterns and samples in a single project.

I highly recommend organizing in a one song per bank fashion. Although some people seem to be able to even have one song per pattern…

I described another way to prepare transitions of patterns here: Planning a Syntakt live set - transition strategies - #7 by Pablo76
Written for the ST, but applies for the DT as well.

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#3

I’m interested in this as well. I busted out DT/DN combo and I’m trying to figure out how I should go about this.

#4

With song mode you can create different songs per project and load them without stopping the current song. Isn’t it?

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#5

If possible put it all in one project.
You can’t transfer patterns from one project to another with Elektron Software unfortunately. ElkHerd is a third party app for that but only supports DT 1.4 (without being able to transfer song data) atm. It’s written by @mzero in his free time.
You can copy patterns across projects on DT itself but it only copies over sample slot numbers (without the actual samples which might differ from project to project).

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#6

hopefully he doesn’t mind me posting this but I think @Doug made this all as one project with DT and novation circuit rhythm and it def plays like a set (to my ears at least), maybe he can comment on a strategy for you.

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#7

I play all in one pattern. Everything improvised. If i would preplan different songs i would use one project.

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#8

With 1.50’s RLen feature on the record page and with nimble fingers (especially tapping along to the beat next to the button in advance of the 1.1 beat), it’s now technically possible to live-resample a playing pattern in mono, drop it into a pre-configured track, filter or loop as desired, and leave it playing through pattern change (by muting the corresponding track on the next pattern). Not Octatrack-caliber stuff, but there are definitely some interesting DJ-style possibilities there…

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#9

Yeah, that one is all one long pattern chain in one project. Most of the samples are on the Circuit Rhythm for that one, which has a lot less sample time per project. I think it’s like 220 seconds.

I’ve never maxed out a project in terms of sample time. I have run out of sample slots and had to purge unused samples. However, with the 1.5 update it’s a lot easier to set up things like sample chains. So even that is less of an issue.

Long story short. No matter what kind of set you want to build, you can and almost certainly should build it on one project. And merging your patterns later is doable but it can be kind of a pain especially if you use a lot of sample locks.

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#10

Thanks for all the answers. It seems there’s pretty much agreement on having everything in one project. I’ll proceed in that direction with confidence!

Thanks again!

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#11

I use one pattern per “song”, but more as a starting point that leaves quite a big room for improvisation (and error lol). For smooth transitions i will always copy some elements of the last track to the next one (For example a Snare(2), a Hat(6) and a Bassline(9) and use Pattern mutes so when i change the pattern you won’t hear a new element until i decide to unmute it. In the pattern before i write into the title wich tracks i copied to the next pattern, so i can bring those in before a pattern change. (in this case the pattern before would be named BANGER 269). So i guess you could say transitions are quite pre-planned, but everything in between is not. Works pretty good for me!

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#12

…usually a song per pank…gives u 8 songs to perform…that’s at least half an hour, more likely 40 minutes, of fluent stage time…
no floor will judge u, if u break the flow for 20 seconds max, in case u have to upload a new project…

if u wanna play content from various projects, have little inbetween snippets prepared, coming from another source or catch the ending moment of a perfamnce segment in some kind of external reverbt/delay fx unit, shattering along while u get hands free to change the project container and make that switch…

but basically, never be afraid of silence…it’s powerful, if u use it to ur advantage in all sorts of sonic story telling and jsut make sure ur change project procedure is rehearsed and therefor as quick as possible…

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#13

wait, what?

I need to actually explore song mode (no time, and trying to write a whole live set… guess I’ll get there when I get to the “making songs” rather than “making patterns”!)

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#14

Yes, this works well, though the next song gets queued up for the next end-of-row, rather than playing to end of song. So it takes a little speed, or looping the last row of the current song.

Having put together some scratch arrangements of 2-3-pattern ideas, I’m averaging about 20 rows a 4-minute song, for building a little set for DT/ST in song mode, so I think I’ll be going song by song (or sometimes combining 2 or 3 and their transitions) to build up to a longer set.

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