Digitone

[Braintree]

Made another little ditty: 

 

https://soundcloud.com/colin-dyer/digitone-jam-03

 

Is it just me or is the UI concerning effect sends kind of confusing? When you're just navigating around, it's not very explicit where it's being sent from or going to.

[pcock]

i really like these boxes, but coming from a modular background i cant help but get annoyed at how truly great they could be if you could just re-route the available LFO's to other channels. even with 4 LFOs to one sound on the digitakt you could make some utterly wild sounds. 1 lfo is just a teast. 

[acid1]

I'm ready for overbridge

[modey]

i really like these boxes, but coming from a modular background i cant help but get annoyed at how truly great they could be if you could just re-route the available LFO's to other channels. even with 4 LFOs to one sound on the digitakt you could make some utterly wild sounds. 1 lfo is just a teast.

Yeah, I'm not sure why only the machinedrum has this feature. It'd be super useful imo!

[acid1]

I think once things don't sound organic you should instead record live. Doesn't fix the problem persay but introduces the element of human error that distracts from computer parameters.

 

Also this thing fucks.

[TubularCorporation]

Realtime parameter record on the Tanzmaus is like what you're describing too, it's kind of frustrating.

[acid1]

Its just record+play (tweak) then play

[digit]

no slide trigs on the digitone?

[Guest Chesney]

It's only going to snapshot the parameter when the trig hits so it's always going to step. You'd have to use a slide trig to slide from one trig to the next on any you consider un musical.

[modey]

No slide trigs on the digi boxes. I don't mind so much as I never use them on the Monomachine, but lots of other people have expressed their frustration.

[Guest Chesney]

Oh right, crazy. I don't use them a great deal myself but when something needs it it's a blessing.

[TubularCorporation]

That's too bad, slide trigs are great if you improvise a lot, since you can drop them in to a pattern on the fly and completely change the character of it, without actually altering the regular trigs at all.  Same with swing trigs.  At first I thought it was kind of a clunky way to go about it because I was more used to global swing and slide being a flag you would set on a step in a sequence, rather than an entirely different layer, but it actually works really well.

[TubularCorporation]

Its just record+play (tweak) then play

 

 

Right, but the issue is that it doesn't record real time control data (like MIDI CC in a regular sequencer, or "motion record" in a Volca, for example), it just records the current parameter value at any given step (both the Elektronand MFB sequencers) so if you're performing live (or just want to record smooth parameter changes) you can tweak some knobs and things will change smoothly, but the recorded data will just be a sequence of quantized parameter changes (or on the MFB machines, it will only store the parameters for steps that are already active).  Live, this means that what you actually record sounds totally different than what you aplayed while you were recording, and in either case it meas that smooth parameter changes aren't possible to sequence.  Not the end of the world but definitely takes some getting sued to and precludes some kinds of performance and sequencing completely.

 

 

EDIT: in the Elektron boxes it would be cool if they at least had some kind of per-parameter (or even just per-track) smoothing/glide you could set, that would open up a lot of possibilities.

[acid1]

I'm gonna be pissed as hell if Elektron announces a full sized Analog FM box and turns this skittles IDM box into a toy.

 

8 voice thru zero analog fm with built in waveshaping for both carrier and modulation signals, analog filter, plus all the other elektron shit. Fuck you Elektron. Pls.

[modey]

I'd like to see a dedicated wavetable synth. Same voice configuration as Digitone but focused on manipulating custom waveforms via morphing, osc sync style retriggering, etc etc. That or some kind of additive/spectral thing but it'd probably be difficult to build an Elektron style interface for something like that..

[xox]

i still cant see them making a synth that could make me sell my md&mnm in order to buy that synth. maaaybe an integrated md-like drum synth witha 21st polymachine and every sequencing feature known to elektron combined together, 16 interactive internal channels, 6 external midi channels, interactive fx sends on every channel... basically possibility to connect everything with everything or at least most things.

i dont get it... would this kind of machine be so difficult to make? id pay 2k euros for it

[pcock]

 

Its just record+play (tweak) then play

 

 

Right, but the issue is that it doesn't record real time control data (like MIDI CC in a regular sequencer, or "motion record" in a Volca, for example), it just records the current parameter value at any given step (both the Elektronand MFB sequencers) so if you're performing live (or just want to record smooth parameter changes) you can tweak some knobs and things will change smoothly, but the recorded data will just be a sequence of quantized parameter changes (or on the MFB machines, it will only store the parameters for steps that are already active).  Live, this means that what you actually record sounds totally different than what you aplayed while you were recording, and in either case it meas that smooth parameter changes aren't possible to sequence.  Not the end of the world but definitely takes some getting sued to and precludes some kinds of performance and sequencing completely.

 

 

EDIT: in the Elektron boxes it would be cool if they at least had some kind of per-parameter (or even just per-track) smoothing/glide you could set, that would open up a lot of possibilities.

 

overbridge, when it turns up in 2019 or whatever though will be able to smoothly automate multiple parameters as far as i can gather. 

[worms]

found a digitone for £550

[pcock]

rubadub has them brand new with warranty atm for 550.

[TubularCorporation]

I'd like t see a serious, multitimbral physical modelling synth from them, with a crossfader and scenes like the Octatrack and a single, large velocity and aftertouch sensitive pad (maybe 1.5" x 1.5") for playing or programming dynamics (obviously useful for percussion but also you could, say, finger a chord on the trig keys in an OT-style chromatic mode, and then strike the pad to actually play it) Still using the"machine" paradigm but with a machine being a physical model you could assemble from different types of exciters and resonators and things, all with fully modulatable parameters.  So, say, you could make a machine that was like a flute mouthpiece exciting a stretched membrane with the sound from the membrane passing through a tube, and then sequence it with the dynamics of the airflow through the mouthpiece controlled by MIDI velocity (PLocked in the sequencer), while modulating the size and shape of the membrane on the X and Y axis with LFOs, an Octatrack style crossfader the tension of the membrane and the aperture of the pipe, with the length of the pipe modulated by the note value of each trig.

 

Not going to happen but it's absolutely technically possible and even if it only had, say, four multitimbral parts with only one or two of them being polyphonic, it would still be incredible.

[Braintree]

Putting together a live set on the Digitone right now, and have been making some minimal techno: https://www.instagram.com/p/BlZnMy6laAb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

[pcock]

i just found out you can loop midi from the out to the in and use all 8 LFOs on one track. same with the digitakt. will be trying it out tommorow. 

[sheatheman]

Yeah, that’s why I sold my digitakt. It started to glitch in ways the octatrack never did.

[drukqs]

Anyone know if Elektron has a fix for the power up problem? I was saving up for a digitakt but if it's something that's going to be a big problem I may opt for something else...

[pcock]

neither of my boxes has ever glitched out. i got them quite late, maybe a newer production model?