OK I’m quite new to Digitakt so what I’m about to describe is probably not news to many out there who have far more experience with the device than I have, so forgive me if this is, in fact, a very well-known, well-worn technique. But I thought I’d share it anyway in case it helps anyone!
Say you had a pattern, and on that pattern a track, and on that track you wanted some effects to take place only on the second iteration of that track.
So for example, perhaps I want the second iteration of the pattern to play my bass sequence a semitone higher. (Arbitrary, improbable example, but it’ll do.) Obviously I could do this with a second pattern, but let’s suppose patterns are at a premium in this project.
AFAIK, that’s not ordinarily possible; you can set trigs themselves to sound conditionally, but not effects. That is to say, the same trig, if it sounds, can’t sometimes have an effect applied to it and sometimes not (LFO notwithstanding).
Anyway, I realised I could duplicate each trig, one step after the original trig. The original trigs should be conditionalised to first-time only, and the duplicated trigs conditionalised to not-first-time only. The effect change (e.g. semitone increase) is applied to the duplicated trigs, as is - and here’s the crucial part - some micro-timing which pulls the trig as far left as possible. This basically makes it sound on the previous step, rather than the one it’s on.
As I say, this may well be very well known, or for all I know there may be other ways to achieve this. The only gotcha is this won’t work if you’ve quantised the track or project, since micro-timing tweaks are (AFAIK) then ignored. And of course you could just as equally put the duplicate trigs on the step before the original trigs then micro-time tweak them forwards, not backwards.
