Hi guys,
Ironically I was doing research about the MPC live when I found Dataline’s Digitakt experience video on the mpc forums.
And my heart stopped. Since then I’ve been watching tutorials and live videos.
Am I correct to understand that you can sample your own sounds in the machine, sequence them in any way you want and recall these patterns live while jamming within the same project… and tweak the hell out of it all?
And within that same project, you can store enough patterns to make a liveset… and make smooth transitions between them if needed?
Please help an honest man spend his hard earned dough.
THANKS for your HELP!
yea sounds about right. 8 banks of 16 patterns per project. 256?
personally my main gripe right now is the lone LFO. 2-3 woulda been lovely
getting by w/ more p-locks but is a lil time consuming depending on what exactly i’m trying to accomplish
You’re correct in understanding. The lone LFO has many workarounds, including live parameter recording… I love the hell out of mine. I’ve neglected my OP-1 lately, only using it as food for the Digitakt. Haven’t looked at the tape in a minute! Such is the honeymoon phase of a new piece of gear.
In regards to your patterns in project question - YES. You have a lot of performance options depending on track mutes and pattern mutes. It opened up my use of my 0Coast with the midi channels. At first, I thought, “I don’t have 8 midi devices”… but then, I realized, I could just make 8 different midi sequences in ONE pattern for ONE device. So, that’s neat.
The saved pattern reload feature is amazing as well… you can mangle it all to hell, and then just immediately recall your original pattern. SUPER useful in performance.
Hope this helps.
Thanks @dockshermsticks and @mrbernard for your detailed answers. Having been mostly focused on basic sampling for hip-hop beatmaking on a mpc 1k and the OP, I think what the digitakt can do in terms of midi and fx is beyond my wildest dreams.
I’m mostly interested in the live performance aspect of things. The videos I watched from dataline and red means recording blew me away, how could I miss this!
I wonder how a gritty vinyl sample sounds on a digitakt. Everything I have heard sounds very clean and lush. I’d really like to go through my bargain bin collection of junk LPs and feed the digitakt and see what happens.
Anyway, I’ll keep watching videos and will download the manual and do a bit of bedtime reading 
@lefilou the Digitakt is an absolute joy to play with. The sequencer is amazing. The 8 MIDI tracks are very clever, you can break out from the Digitakt’s MIDI outputs to e.g. a Volca or some other synth (or more than one) and fold back into the Digitakt’s analog path - that’s how I currently use it - 8 fixed Volca Beats sounds and the 8 variable of the Digitakt, all with conditional trigs and LFOs. Tempted to wire up the Volca FM to it and sequence some noises out of that. The Digitakt didn’t get all the love it deserves at launch, but it’s a capable little box in its own right.
Thanks @eesn I have a volca bass laying around somewhere but if I am really into the sampling-only route.
Do you think the digitakt audio track capabilities would be sufficient for an uninterrupted sampled based live performance?
I really want to stick to one machine as much as possible and the liveset videos I have seen on YouTube so far don’t go further than 15mn… while I’d like to push towards over an hour.
Thanks!
I think what the digitakt can do in terms of midi and fx is beyond my wildest dreams.I love my Digitakt but FX are a bit limited (reverb, delay, bit crushing, filter) - would love to see something crazy like the CWO being added in future firmware updates. You can of course start modulating sample start times with LFOs and get a bit more crazy sounds out of it.
I wonder how a gritty vinyl sample sounds on a digitakt. Everything I have heard sounds very clean and lush. I'd really like to go through my bargain bin collection of junk LPs and feed the digitakt and see what happens. Anyway, I'll keep watching videos and will download the manual and do a bit of bedtime reading :)
Sounds clean and lush due to the samples people use in the videos. I filled its drive with some dirty dnb samples and the dirt is still there 
Maybe we can arrange a London op1/digitakt/volka meetup or something?
@mrbernard ahhh live recording okay okay. thanks man
any other tips?
i admittedly haven’t spent a TON of time w/ mine yet.
@eesn what do you mean by 'and fold those outs back into the Digitakt's analog path' I'm intrigued.
the Audio In on the Digitakt is always audible, and it has a MIDI out and thru ports, so you can sequence MIDI, have whatever plays the MIDI come back on the DT’s audio-in and come out the DT’s audio-out. Saves you a mixer input too
@lefilou I’ll probably get grief for saying, but id hold out on a digitakt purchase if I was you. I just started to give ipad a 2nd (and probably final…) chance and considering you were initially looking at MPC live, maybe Beatmaker 3 would offer you a ton more bang for buck than DT?
It’s not the same ui/workflow as Elektron sequencing but can yield basically the same results (and in most cases faster too after you’ve set up an ‘Elektron’ template) + tons more EVERYTHING, should you need it. More voices, polyphonic tracks, Infinite modulation (including step modulation), linear + scenes/pattern options, infinite fx (and insert vs send options), more memory, sample layers (with mod + fx per layer), editable automation, timestrech, tons of mulit-paramter performance macros, onboard synths via AUv3 plugin, very cool ‘rolls’ touch pad (destroys Elektrons ‘retrig’ implementation imo) , sample from radio internally without cables Op1 style, granular via AUv3 plugin (and internal coming soon in update)… the list is endless. I know ‘more’ isn’t always a good thing, but since using it I’m struggling to feel like it would benefit in any way from the Elektron/DT style limitations. That stuff is easy enough to self-impose if desired and the limitations on my Octatrack/op1 begin to feel less ‘creative’ and more ‘Ugh… Let’s find a workaround again’ or worse ‘damn, I’ll have to abandon that idea’.
Right now I’m keeping hold of my OT and Op1 because the BM3 workflow/ui still needs ironing out. But I’m on the beta team and in contact with the devs and from the roadmap the imminent future looks BRIGHT Especially in terms of performance features.
You could shop around and grab a 2017 9.7" 128gb ipad, a Roland duo capture ex (battery powered) and Bluetooth knobs controller. Get a board and velcro the iPad on top of the interface and the knobs on there too and have a portable rig with a ton of power and storage for less than the DT…
Also, DT has been out for a while now and seen barely any significant updates. The total opposite is true of BM3. Elektron seem to be spreading themselves thin these days. And also with the OT mkii release its kind of doubtful they’ll add too much to DT in the forseeably future in fear of sales loss… If I was you I’d hold out a couple of months and see what gets added/refined in BM3 and whether Elektron beef up DT.
Flipside is that obvs you could just grab a DT now and sell it later if you wanted. It’s by no means a ‘bad box’, guaranteed to enjoy using it and I doubt you’d lose much £.
Hey @callthevoid thanks so much for the detailed explanation there! I seems like BM3 and iPad are a great combo for production purpose but what about live performance?
That’s what I’ve been impressed with looking at the DT videos would love to use it that way.
Also to my question about a 1 hour live session with DT only? Doable?
Just printed the manual, will read over the weekend
Thanks
It’s a mixed bag on both options. Probably about even for live improv…
DT has ctr-all, reload pattern, pattern banks etc.
BM3 has multiple parameter performance macros you can assign a bunch of params to. 16 of these macros per bank/track. Global macros are confirmed for update.
More fx options to perform with.
The ‘rolls’ pad is cool for performance.
If you pair BM3 with a controller you have 128 velocity sensitive pads per bank. So 128 samples to hand to perform with, per bank (128 banks…) vs the DT which has 8 samples loaded at any one time to manually ‘play’. Obvs don’t ‘need’ a controller for this in bm3, can use screen, but pads obvs feel better.
For patterns it has linear song timeline and/or ‘scenes’ (like ableton pattern performance). You can instant pattern jump between patterns without pattern starting from 1st step and also do polyrhythms with different length patterns/tracks running simultaneously etc (maybe DT has these two functions too? Not sure) .
64 ‘notes’ on screen at once in pads ‘keys’ mode’ for playing chromatically. Vs 16 step buttons for chromatic on Elektron (scrolling left/right for octaves).
Out of the box DT is probably the better choice to jam out a performance on. Depending on how many sample voices you want etc. But only takes half hour to set up a BM3 project template that’s roughly on par. Updates seem like they’ll give BM3 the edge for performance soon but no guarantee on exactly when they’ll drop. Still at the ‘ironing out UI/workflow/bugs’ stage atm.
1 hour set should be possible on both options. Yet to see anyone do that on BM3 tho so don’t quote me on it
@callofthevoid - have DT and iPad here - DT gets way more regular use for music than the iPad. The DT has seen critical bugfix updates. Is the iPad infinitely more flexible - yes. Still, in my view, it loses out to the ergonomics of the DT which are not to be dismissed at all - Elektron must have worked hard on those buttons.
@lefilou, banks + patterns, if you take time to set up your project, should give you what you’re after. Especially if you pair it with a second box that would provide longer (timing-wise) textures/samples, then it’s practically a non-issue. But even trigs and sample shaping alone would provide you with enough variation so that you’re under no pressure to race on to the next 4 or 8 bars.
I agree with that! I find the physicality of the DT to be more inspiring than the iPad. The iPad has WAY more possibilities, but at the end of the day, I’m more for something on my hands than tapping glass… especially on stage. I use the iPad a ton for couch sketching, though.
The conditional trigs really open up a pattern. Even just 16 steps can sound like 12 or 20 bars. It’s really wild. I forget about the fill feature too…
All that said. The “true for me” about the DT is that the immediacy of it makes it feel like I’m working on music. The iPad has never felt that way outside of the Animoog app. iPad feels like I’m preparing to work on music - which has its place, of course.
Thanks @callofthevoid, @eesn and @mrbernard for the help, I think that’s plenty indeed!
I think I’m almost sold, but speaking of samples… If I understand correctly I could sample a drumbreak, manually assign different parts/slices of that drumbreak to different steps in one of the 8 audio tracks, within a pattern right?
If so is it possible to have one drum slice not overlap the other when it starts? Like the 1st step audio stops when the 2nd one starts so it’s a clean cut. They’re called choke groups on the MPC, if that helps
Thanks so much!
THANKS!
So and on top of that, I can easily assign different parts of the same drumbreak sample to different steps on the same audio track?
Dude this is the deal maker for me!
@lefilou each track plays one voice, samples on same track choke each other, just tried
@lefilou you can assign different samples, or you can assign parts of the same sample to each of the trigs and change them as you like - the only thing DT hasn’t got is automatic slicing - you see people complain a lot about that - personally it doesn’t bother me.
@lefilou you can assign different samples, or you can assign parts of the same sample to each of the trigs and change them as you like - the only thing DT hasn't got is automatic slicing - you see people complain a lot about that - personally it doesn't bother me.
Well that’s great! Same here, never used automatic slicing either, always manual.
Do you feel like the 64MB ram fill up easily within the same project?
Thanks