Maybe people will dislike this thread…but I got a brand new digitakt yesterday and just wanted to give a shout out to how amazing the built-in samples and sounds are! There are so many incredible useful and punchy drums, and they chose the perfect waveforms, stabs, and pads to put on here. Coming from FL Studio which is very bad in this department it is a bit of a shock!
Thank you!! All of the drums (except for the acoustic) are done by me, except the ‘Don’ kit which @Olle made. Cenk made a lot of the melodic synth sounds, and I did all the noise and single cycles.
Working on them was absolutely insane, but so much fun. Made more samples than I could ever believe in a pretty short amount of time. None of the samples come from drum machines*, which was an important aspect for me. I wanted them to be completely original, so I’m happy to hear that you enjoy them!
(*Rytm and Machinedrum an exception since they in part classify as drum synths. A bugbrand DRM-1 and Pearl Syncussion was used as well)
So, these ‘made more samples than I could ever believe…’ that are sitting around all alone and scared in some hard drive- you going to release them into the wild?
Hmm yeah, they are. I mean, I recorded around 1500+ samples in total. Maybe one day.
Depends - if I was recording hardware I would record a long stream of sounds and then cut up afterwards. Then I ran a script that trimmed them a bit, picked out my favorites that felt like they were ‘a kit’ and processed them a bit to get the best out of the material.
For example, a lot of the ‘analog’ sounds were made with a Bugbrand modular.
A lot of the sounds were made digitally too, most with Ableton’s Operator through a lot of processing. Those I built a kit out of in Ableton and just rendered each sound/track. A bit easier, hehe.
Haha, but yeah, it’s very well designed. Sometimes a bit lofi, it’s weird that the modulator outputs are inverted (just set the phase to 50% though), but the interface is phenomenal and it’s really quick to work with.
Makes sense now. With some of the drums I was thinking ‘Hmm this sounds like it could’ve been made with Operator/Digitone’. And that’s not meant in a bad way. They are 2 of my favorite synths
I just got a Digitakt today and just checked out the factory content. I noticed most of the sounds have a similar caracter of fullness, punchyness and sometimes roundness to them. I was wondering if you used anything specific to process them with? Or is it just a matter of skill?
I agree. I also recently got myself a Digitakt and haven’t since touched my go-to drum synth (Microtonic) for meat & potatoes stuff like kicks, snares and hats because the factory drum samples give such a damn solid starting point.
Hmm! Well the digital stuff (operator) is quite processed with d16 Devastor , but other than that it’s “just” a matter of careful processing and tweaking. I would say with confidence say percussive synthesis is my expertise. It’s a good challenge and a lot of fun.
Gear list for the factory content is quite diverse:
Bugbrand DRM1
Pearl Syncussion
Machinedrum
Rytm
Ableton Operator
Bugbrand Synthvoice system
Make Noise 0-coast
Buchla 200e (@Olle !)
Applied Acoustics Chromaphone
+++
Really was a huge endeavor, I wanted each kit to be unique not only in itself but to the device as well. Happy to hear that it’s appreciated.
Devastor is also nice sounding. From the polished, thick and sort of round sounding to the more extremes. Redopter and Decimort are also great
Thank you for the list.
I guess that it helps a lot to have a certain expertice to get a good output. But having your heart and deep interest in something is definetly very important as well. Often other people would also notice that energy when it comes to a product or a company. Not always that people do though.
The drums definetly have something of their own in terms of caracter and quality. I appreciate them a lot.
The few times I’ve done drums on Operator I’ve also enjoyed the process. Something to be done more often
I’m feeling a bit bashful here to admit that in all the time I’ve had my DT I’ve never even thought to check out the factory content as I was always so keen to load my curated sample lib in there. Seems I need to go back and check it out… the conversation here has been really interesting.
And, speaking of creating drums using Operator, I’m a huge fan of this tutorial from big Rab Henke…
Applicable to any FM scenario so the principles work equally well with the DN.