Hey, good people,
After years of resisting learning drum machines (beats just ain’t my strong point), I went and got the Digitakt, I’m spending hours on tutorials at night, and can already get some basic beats down (haven’t learned the conditional trigs, yet, that’s next, having a hard time getting my head around that and the fill mode).
Anyways, I have a quick question or two. I tend to do a lot of minimal (and minimal beat) ambient stuff. Something I like to sometimes do is take an arp from my Access Virus, and then adjust the cutoff down so it ends up sounding more like a beat, albeit a very non-imposing one.
Is there a way I can do this with the digi? I think the concept is pretty easy… apply the cutoff to the entire beat, but, from what I’ve learned thus far, I can only do that to individual tracks. Is that the case? If I can cutoff the entire beat, can I also manipulate that master cutoff with the lfo for a sweeping effect? Also, can I do reverb and delay on the master track, or are those individual, only? Thanks.
In general, you can only apply filters and FX on a per-track basis. However, you could use control-all to live-effect all tracks at the same time. It can get a little tricky if you have any trig locks though.
Another option would be to resample the entire beat to an internal audio track then apply whatever “master” effects there.
You can modify all tracks by pressing and holding TRK and then turning the knob (eg Filter Cutoff). This is called Control All. Usually people do this while playing for performance features. There’s no master filter or effects (nor are there bus sends for this sort of thing). You could apply the LFO to all filter cutoffs but that might be a bit tedious.
Same applies to reverb and delay - it’s per track.
Regarding wrapping your head around conditional trigs - they’re not that bad. Percentage = chance the trig will happen. 1/2, 2/4, etc = the trig will occur on the x loop of y total loops. So the 1st loop of every 2 loops, or the 2nd loop of every 4 loops. The Fill means it will play if Fill is held down (that’s like a 1 button performance scene if you want to think of it that way). The hardest trig condition is Neighbour which means it will play if the neighbouring track had a trig condition that was played. So for example if track 6 had a trig on beat 1 that had a 40% chance of playing and track 7 on beat 2 had a NEI condition, it would not play unless that track 6 trig happened.
The NOT conditions (line over the word) means it will play if it does NOT trigger (many have this). So like, if the “condition” does not happen, play the trig.
So, if I’m understanding the trig conditions, are they most useful for things where you’ve got a more or less steady groove, but you want to add some randomness to it to mix it up?
Can someone explain fill mode to me a bit better? I watched a few vids and still can’t get my head around it.
That might be an option, I want to see how it sounds with the control all. first. Why does it get tricky with trig locks? Because those are locked and won’t be affected?
Right, I’m not by my DT right now to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure parameter locks take priority over control-all changes. Hopefully someone else could confirm.
Also, FYI, slight correction to @RandomSkratch’s comment:
You can modify all tracks by pressing and holding FUNC and then turning the knob (eg Filter Cutoff).
Control-all is actually done by holding the TRK button, not FUNC. Holding FUNC while turning a knob will make it jump to useful or common values.
So FILL is like a manual toggle for trig condition (FILL/NOT FILL).
When a trigger is set with FILL, it will only play when you press and hold FILL as the pattern is playing. You could fill a whole pattern with 16th note snare hits, all with FILL set and it won’t play unless you hold FILL. It comes from Drum Fill if you’re familiar with the term. Drummers would add an alt ending to say the 4th bar of a 4 bar loop. You can program this yourself.
It can also work in reverse - NOT FILL - which means that the trigger will not play when you press fill. Say you program a 4 on floor kick beat and all have the condition of NOT FILL (line over FILL), this means that if the FILL is NOT pressed, the kick will trigger but if you hold down FILL, it will not play so you could use this as a live performance tool to drop out the kick instantly (yeah you can mute but this is just example).
Or if you wanted to get fancy - again with the same 4 beat kick pattern, set the primary 4 trigs to NOT FILL and then copy and paste each trig to the next slot and then shift the micro timing all the way left. Parameter lock the high pass filter of these second trigs to remove all but the click of the kick and set trig condition to FILL. Now when you press and hold fill, you have an instant high passed kick channel (shifting the trig all the way left will make it play ALMOST the same time as the previous trig).
Conditional triggering is one of the stand out features of the Elektron sequencers. You can create a beat that will loop but not repeat for tens of bars, maybe more. Each pass through the loop will see a handful of beats appear or disappear depending on the trig conditions. You can go mad putting them everywhere but I find less is more; subtle notes added and dropped can give the impression of a lot more going on than a simple 16 step sequence. The real fun starts when you add sample locked trigs too, so those steps are a different sound to the others. Super simple to build up a complex drum pattern on one part using only 16 steps, sample locks and cond trigs. You just can’t have more than one sound per step.
Considering the kind of music I primarily make, this sounds incredibly useful. Can I apply trig conditions to the sample locked trigs, too, say, if I just want to trigger that extra sound occasionally?
There is a way to get a master filter for all tracks. You have to sacrifice your delay or reverb effect tho.
If you go into the audio routing menu in settings, you will be able to route every track going to the outputs regardless of mutes.
Mute all of your audio tracks in this menu (keep them active elsewhere).
Exit the menu bu pressing the trig, src, or lfo page buttons.
Turn the delay send all the way up on all tracks
Go to the delay fx page and turn the feedback all the way down.
All of your tracks are now routed thru the delay and reverb. you can use their filters as a master filter.
Yeah, on the DN I’ve just added an extra note in a sequence, sound locked it to trigger a different patch for that one note and then set a trig condition for the trig to play on every other pass (ie 1:2). Fairly sure you should be able to achieve the same results on the DT but as mentioned earlier, I don’t own one.
Holding the trig you want to modify and turning the level/data knob to change the patch for that trig
