At Knobcon 2017, we talked with Elektron product specialist Devon Hughes. He was demonstrating using new Digitakt with MIDI gear, and sampling it back into the Digitakt.
The Digitakt is an eight-track digital drum machine and sampler, introduced at the 2017 NAMM Show.
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Digitakt is available now for €769/$679.
he didn’t explain much of what he did to the sample, said something about reversing it but that’s obviously not all that was done, can any body else shed some light on it?
It looks like he is holding down the step he wants reversed and is then changing the speed/direction via the multi-function knobs at the top. You do the same to do parameter locked per step on the Toraiz SP-16.
On Elektrons you have knobs for both Start and End points. If you set the Start knob to Max and the End knob to Min your sample plays in reverse.
Yeah perhaps the demo was a bit too quick and funkless…hahah. I’ll chill out a bit next time. But to explain what was going on:
As soon as you assign the sample to a pad, you can sequence it out on the step sequencer (16 buttons representing 1 musical bar, most of the time). Where it gets fun is to hold down the any step button which contains a note trigger, and then tweak parameters, which are then immediately “locked” to that step. Some of the sample parameters which are instantly lockable to a step are “Tune” [which is why it started playing at double speed]” “Play Mode” [forward, reverse, forward + loop, etc], “filter cutoff”.
He is probably just monitoring it through the ins. When your ready to sample, you just hit the Direct Recording button and hit yes. It could go by pretty quickly. Once you capture the sample you can instantly assign it to a pad. So he could already have a reversed pattern set up with triggers and just loading a new sample into it without much stop/start. It just keeps playing.
I like the quick workflow. Wish I could say the same for the demo. I realise he’s trying to work quickly to show how easy it is to use, but it really wouldn’t have taken much longer to just try and do something that sounded good.
Complaining about how a sampler sounds – priceless!
Nice little demo. To the point!