Thank you for doing these videos showcasing the digitone. So many people are focused on the digitakt, but the digitone is the most rewarding elektron box I own and I think it’s often overlooked.
Cheers Mathew! The Digitone was my first and only Elektron Box and I definitely agree on that. I recently got the Digitakt and still figure out a way to use them both together. But on it's own the Digitone as a synth and groovebox is absolutely unique!
Hey Dennis, that's great to hear! Very happy to hear that the video was helpful and yeah, the Digitone can be quite complex. Keep it up and most importantly have fun with the synth! 🙂
Vielen Dank für die tollen Videos und Tipps zum Elektron Digitone. Ich besitze das Gerät seit wenigen Wochen und möchte es für Grundbeats nutzen, um darin Pianosounds (Yamaha NU 1) einzubinden. Deine Videos haben mir sehr geholfen, denn das Gerät ist sehr komplex. Ich freue mich auf weitere tolle Videos. Frohe Weihnachten!
Hey Michael, ich danke dir für die netten Worte, freut mich sehr, dass die Videos helfen! Fuchse mich gerade in den Digitakt rein, aber bald kommen auch noch mehr Digitone-Videos. 😁 Dir ebenfalls eine schöne Weihnachtszeit!
Soooo cool. Good to see someone who has a clear idea of what they are doing break it down! I have a similar workflow with the OP-Z but this makes me inspired to try to get more of a solid structure and build up some songwriting speed on the Digitione. Thanks as always and keen to see how you plan to integrate the Digitakt!
Cheers mate, so many thanks for the feedback! Really happy that you find the process inspirational, would love to see how it differs from your workflow with the OP-Z. Did you think about teaming it up with the Digitone for your jams? I'm btw excited to see how the Digitakt integrates too haha, but I'm sure it'll find it's way. :)
@@MilesKvndra it’s true, man! The Digitone can sometimes feel a little hard to get an understanding of. I’m sure your videos are helping a lot of people that use these devices.
@@RobbekenSynthMusic awesome! Happy to give something back to the synth community as I've gotten so much help from the community myself. Really glad to be part of that!
@@MilesKvndra I'll keep watching Miles! I'm looking to connect with more artists and I created a new channel teaching digital marketing and promotion for musicians. If you have any interest in that it would be cool if you could check it out. Hope there’s something there you like! Take care!
Nice work. It’s interesting to see your process very clearly described and demonstrated. The different ways we all approach the creative process is fascinating. Yours is very organised but the results sounds very spontaneous - which is a great thing. I generally start with chaos and slowly start to bring order, but I’m going to try your steps to see if anything unexpected happens! Top work on this tutorial 👌🏻
Thank you so much James and absolutely agree! Love to see other people's creative process because it's always inspiring and gives me new ideas. I try to be organized and this structure gives me a good way to go from scratch to a finished jam but I find myself breaking out of this structure many times and doing something differently. Chaos can be great to come up with fresh ideas!
Very good advice! I really must implement these on my Digitone! Congratulations on your album on Spotify! Now I have some songs that I can take with me! :)
Hey Daryl! At 8:16 I'm just holding the PAGE button to stay in FILL mode and turn some parameters of the global delay (feedback and reverb). At 8:36 I hit FUNC+No to reload the pattern from the safe state, unmute the bass track (track 2) and then release the PAGE button to exit FILL mode.
Thanks for taking me through your process! As a new owner of a Digitone, I find it very helpful to see how you've worked around some of its limitations. I struggle with the fact that Patterns contain all Tracks (vs the other way around, each track having its own set of patterns you could choose from). It forces me to plan ahead, just like you're doing. I'd love to be able to switch the pattern of the drum track without having to plan ahead for where the filter state should be for the melody or bassline for each energy level. If I could just change the drum track independently, the state of the other tracks would just continue exactly where it was before the drums changed. Sometimes I just want to decrease the drum energy but I don't have a particular plan in mind other than to emphasize the melody and/or bass. Switching patterns means keeping several copies of existing track sequences, all of which can be slightly different. I feel like your approach is like rehearsing a live performance where you have to have a predefined idea for how you want the song to progress - you can't just see where the feeling might take you. I guess you've found a way to embrace it, but personally, I wish it were simpler. I wish Tracks contained Patterns instead. To me, this makes me more interested in pairing it up with the Digitakt though, because then I could spread out the drums across 3-4 tracks and as a result have much more flexibility with the drum energy level without having to think through how to plan for the ideal energy level for all melodic parts. I guess this is exactly the conclusion Elektron would hope I'd make, grrr. 🤬😂
Hey David, thanks for the comment and the probs, I appreciate that! I'm not sure if I get your idea right of having patterns inside of the tracks: do you mean you have for example one drum track and this contains different drum patterns? I think I just got used to this "Elektron layout" so I've never questioned it and it works good for my workflow!
@@MilesKvndra Yes, I mean exactly that! A track in my world will always contain drums on track 1, bass on track 2, etc, and in order to mix and match any drum pattern with any bass line requires you to save patterns for all possible combinations. My point is that it forces you to think beforehand about which combinations you will want at which parts of a song/jam, so it strangely forces you to plan your jam session as if you're writing a song, despite the Digitone not having a song mode and supposedly being made for live jamming. If it were really built for live jamming, it would have made much more sense to allow you to switch patterns per track the way the Roland MC-101 and Novation Circuit Tracks do it. Then those grooveboxes have "scenes" for chaining specific pattern combinations across tracks together just like the Digitone does it. So, on those machines, you can choose if you just want to change up the drums without changing anything else. I'm trying to think about how this might be achieved with the Digitone. I guess you could break a rhythm down by going into the step sequencer and taking out certain steps, but then you'd have to be careful not to switch pattern and thus make those pattern changes permanent. I suppose you could also hold down a few steps and pull down the volume of those trigs to have them fade out. But that's getting a bit complex to do live and you may end up messing up your patterns. But it's the only way I can think of to build up the drums in a more improvised way without having several drum states saved across several patterns.
@@sinewaymusic yeah you're totally right, that's indeed a bit tricky on the Digitone. Your approach makes sense and I can't think of a different way of doing things - that gets indeed a little easier when pairing it with the Digitakt and this way have the drums spread across several tracks.
Hey Andy, thanks a bunch! I don't have something like that yet but I'm definitely planning to do something like that in the future. Did it in one of my previous livestreams with Digitone only and it was great fun! :)
Hey man, just got a DT and stumbled on your channel. This is my fist synth, so it's going to be a while while before I "git gud" at using it, yo make it look effortless. How long have you been using it? Anyway, thought I'd say hi. I'll def be following your channel in my Elektron journey. Any other creators you'd recommend? I've been following Cuckoo, BoBeats, Red Means Recording, Messy Desk and the like. Keep up the great work. This is clearest way -for me anyway- that song/jam structure has been laid out.
Hey Carlos, great to see you here and thanks for saying hi and following - I really appreciate it! :) I've had the Digitone for a year now but I've tried it many times in a synth store before getting it so I wasn't completely new to it. But I definitely realise that there's still a lot to learn about this synth that's why it stays on my desk. The creators you mentioned are all great - apart from these I'd recommend Ivar Tryti and Oscillator Sink, they've great content on the Digitone and also other devices too. Cheers and keep on jamming! 🙂
Very nice ideas ! I’ve seen couple of your videos and I see you use the fill to mute some elements and add effects to others .. I have never tried .. but wondering how you do that ?
Hey Marcelo, thanks a bunch! To mute elements I'm using the reverse fill (the one with the bar above it) as a trig condition so whenever I hit fill mode the respective trig isn't playing. And for the effects I'm using fill trigs that have way stronger send effects on them as the normal trigs. Cheers! :)
@@MilesKvndra Hi Miles , thanks for sharing, cool approach I will experiment with it as it a very useful shortcut for transitioning ! Your videos are inspiring me to create e new live with my elektron gear ! Thanks for the inspiration!!☀️☀️👏🏽
@@marceloberges9017 thanks so much for the great feedback! Really happy to hear that my content is inspiring for you, have a lot of fun creating the set 🙌🏻
Hey Alejandro, yes there is a little trick to make this work, I show it in this tutorial (jump to the part about drums): th-cam.com/video/IYxzq8OBdQI/w-d-xo.html
Why all the love for this device that has so few arps and a fatal flaw in the delay changing of patterns via MIDI program change? I feel burned by all the folks who sing its praises, and I've had it for about a week. But thank you for this video, I'll watch it and I'm sure I'll learn something.
Hey Timothy, appreciate your feedback and totally see your points regarding the downsides the Digitone definitely has. But I have never gotten my hands on an instrument that inspired me to make so much music, to experiment that much with sounddesign and to try out so many new things. I know I can speak only for myself here but that's just what I feel about the Digitone and why I sometimes praise it so much. 🙂 Hope you enjoy the video and did learn something!
This is great. Just curious as to how you’re making the drum track play slower (1.41 onwards)...and then on page 3 of the track it seems to only play up to step 5 and then carries on. Can you explain?
Cheers Liam! The track playing slower is because I set the pattern speed to 1/2 to make the pattern longer (128 steps). And the thing where it only plays till step 5 is because I made a cut in the video there :D No magic going on haha
Thank you for doing these videos showcasing the digitone. So many people are focused on the digitakt, but the digitone is the most rewarding elektron box I own and I think it’s often overlooked.
Cheers Mathew! The Digitone was my first and only Elektron Box and I definitely agree on that. I recently got the Digitakt and still figure out a way to use them both together. But on it's own the Digitone as a synth and groovebox is absolutely unique!
looking forward to another amazing tutorial
Cheers Giri! See you tomorrow! 🙌
very clear no nonsense thank you
Cheers Dominic! Appreciate that 🙏🏻
This is a really good tutorial to me the digitone is a little complex advanced device and this really helped me out with queuing up patterns
Hey Dennis, that's great to hear! Very happy to hear that the video was helpful and yeah, the Digitone can be quite complex. Keep it up and most importantly have fun with the synth! 🙂
Yes!! Waiting too, love your tutorials
Thanks a bunch! Looking forward to see you on Saturday 😎
@@MilesKvndra Hope I can make it but am definitely going to watch! Just got my digitone last week. Amazing and fun
@@Expectaz that's nice - you'll soon start to love it even more. :)
@@MilesKvndra Can’t wait to see it!
Great music and tutorial. Thank you!
You're welcome and thank you for the kind words - happy to hear that! 🙂
Great stuff Miles. Thanks for sharing!
Cheers velvet! Thanks for your comment, appreciate it
Vielen Dank für die tollen Videos und Tipps zum Elektron Digitone. Ich besitze das Gerät seit wenigen Wochen und möchte es für Grundbeats nutzen, um darin Pianosounds (Yamaha NU 1) einzubinden. Deine Videos haben mir sehr geholfen, denn das Gerät ist sehr komplex.
Ich freue mich auf weitere tolle Videos.
Frohe Weihnachten!
Hey Michael, ich danke dir für die netten Worte, freut mich sehr, dass die Videos helfen! Fuchse mich gerade in den Digitakt rein, aber bald kommen auch noch mehr Digitone-Videos. 😁
Dir ebenfalls eine schöne Weihnachtszeit!
@@MilesKvndra Vielen Dank, Miles! Deine Videos sind bisher die Besten, die ich im Netz gefunden habe! Bitte dranbleiben!
@@michaelkoch1268 das mach ich!
Soooo cool. Good to see someone who has a clear idea of what they are doing break it down! I have a similar workflow with the OP-Z but this makes me inspired to try to get more of a solid structure and build up some songwriting speed on the Digitione. Thanks as always and keen to see how you plan to integrate the Digitakt!
Cheers mate, so many thanks for the feedback! Really happy that you find the process inspirational, would love to see how it differs from your workflow with the OP-Z. Did you think about teaming it up with the Digitone for your jams? I'm btw excited to see how the Digitakt integrates too haha, but I'm sure it'll find it's way. :)
@@MilesKvndra I think a Digitone + Blacbox tutorial might be on the cards before I start the OPZ + Digitone Vids :)
@@RDiefenbach ohhh boy that is great news and will be an instant watch as well! Assume that this is a great combo too
Nice flow. These tips are greatly appreciated.
That's really cool to hear - thank you!
@@MilesKvndra it’s true, man! The Digitone can sometimes feel a little hard to get an understanding of. I’m sure your videos are helping a lot of people that use these devices.
@@RobbekenSynthMusic awesome! Happy to give something back to the synth community as I've gotten so much help from the community myself. Really glad to be part of that!
Thank you for the video Miles, I really enjoyed it.
That's great to hear! Thanks a lot 🙏
Great man! useful and easy to understand! keep posting!
Thank you for your feedback - really appreciate it! More tutorials are definitely planned
@@MilesKvndra I'll keep watching Miles! I'm looking to connect with more artists and I created a new channel teaching digital marketing and promotion for musicians. If you have any interest in that it would be cool if you could check it out. Hope there’s something there you like! Take care!
Yes more tutorials,good job
Thank you! More coming soon :)
Nice work. It’s interesting to see your process very clearly described and demonstrated. The different ways we all approach the creative process is fascinating. Yours is very organised but the results sounds very spontaneous - which is a great thing. I generally start with chaos and slowly start to bring order, but I’m going to try your steps to see if anything unexpected happens! Top work on this tutorial 👌🏻
Thank you so much James and absolutely agree! Love to see other people's creative process because it's always inspiring and gives me new ideas. I try to be organized and this structure gives me a good way to go from scratch to a finished jam but I find myself breaking out of this structure many times and doing something differently. Chaos can be great to come up with fresh ideas!
I love the Happy accidents when performing live and going off my techno intuition
Absolutely agree, Owen! This happens a lot with the Elektron devices and it's the best thing!
Thanks for the tutorial. Enjoyed it :)
You're welcome, Kevin! Really happy to hear that :)
8:48 wow what did you just do??? hahaha mental
Yeah that's so much fun! Turning up the delay feedback is great for transitions - just need to be careful not going too high (not above 95)
thank you bro!!
You are welcome! Glad when you find the tutorials useful 🙂🙌🏻
Thanks dude
You’re welcome Davey!
Very good advice! I really must implement these on my Digitone! Congratulations on your album on Spotify! Now I have some songs that I can take with me! :)
Thanks buddy! Glad you find it useful and happy to hear that you dig the songs too 🙌
Thanks man for sharing, really appreciated
You're welcome! Thanks for hanging out :)
This is so great!
Thank you, Lemont! Really happy to hear that :)
Thanks for sharing - that was great. :-)
Thank you for your comment, Kris. Glad to hear you liked it :)
Hi Miles. Watching this again. I'm interested in the key combination you're doing at 8:16 and 8:36. What's the sequencer doing then?
Hey Daryl! At 8:16 I'm just holding the PAGE button to stay in FILL mode and turn some parameters of the global delay (feedback and reverb). At 8:36 I hit FUNC+No to reload the pattern from the safe state, unmute the bass track (track 2) and then release the PAGE button to exit FILL mode.
@@MilesKvndra thanks for this tutorial, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for taking me through your process! As a new owner of a Digitone, I find it very helpful to see how you've worked around some of its limitations. I struggle with the fact that Patterns contain all Tracks (vs the other way around, each track having its own set of patterns you could choose from). It forces me to plan ahead, just like you're doing. I'd love to be able to switch the pattern of the drum track without having to plan ahead for where the filter state should be for the melody or bassline for each energy level. If I could just change the drum track independently, the state of the other tracks would just continue exactly where it was before the drums changed.
Sometimes I just want to decrease the drum energy but I don't have a particular plan in mind other than to emphasize the melody and/or bass. Switching patterns means keeping several copies of existing track sequences, all of which can be slightly different. I feel like your approach is like rehearsing a live performance where you have to have a predefined idea for how you want the song to progress - you can't just see where the feeling might take you.
I guess you've found a way to embrace it, but personally, I wish it were simpler. I wish Tracks contained Patterns instead. To me, this makes me more interested in pairing it up with the Digitakt though, because then I could spread out the drums across 3-4 tracks and as a result have much more flexibility with the drum energy level without having to think through how to plan for the ideal energy level for all melodic parts. I guess this is exactly the conclusion Elektron would hope I'd make, grrr. 🤬😂
Hey David, thanks for the comment and the probs, I appreciate that! I'm not sure if I get your idea right of having patterns inside of the tracks: do you mean you have for example one drum track and this contains different drum patterns? I think I just got used to this "Elektron layout" so I've never questioned it and it works good for my workflow!
@@MilesKvndra Yes, I mean exactly that! A track in my world will always contain drums on track 1, bass on track 2, etc, and in order to mix and match any drum pattern with any bass line requires you to save patterns for all possible combinations.
My point is that it forces you to think beforehand about which combinations you will want at which parts of a song/jam, so it strangely forces you to plan your jam session as if you're writing a song, despite the Digitone not having a song mode and supposedly being made for live jamming. If it were really built for live jamming, it would have made much more sense to allow you to switch patterns per track the way the Roland MC-101 and Novation Circuit Tracks do it. Then those grooveboxes have "scenes" for chaining specific pattern combinations across tracks together just like the Digitone does it. So, on those machines, you can choose if you just want to change up the drums without changing anything else.
I'm trying to think about how this might be achieved with the Digitone. I guess you could break a rhythm down by going into the step sequencer and taking out certain steps, but then you'd have to be careful not to switch pattern and thus make those pattern changes permanent. I suppose you could also hold down a few steps and pull down the volume of those trigs to have them fade out. But that's getting a bit complex to do live and you may end up messing up your patterns. But it's the only way I can think of to build up the drums in a more improvised way without having several drum states saved across several patterns.
@@sinewaymusic yeah you're totally right, that's indeed a bit tricky on the Digitone. Your approach makes sense and I can't think of a different way of doing things - that gets indeed a little easier when pairing it with the Digitakt and this way have the drums spread across several tracks.
Really useful, thanks. Do you have any tutorials on building a track from scratch/nothing on the DT and DN?
Hey Andy, thanks a bunch! I don't have something like that yet but I'm definitely planning to do something like that in the future. Did it in one of my previous livestreams with Digitone only and it was great fun! :)
Hey man, just got a DT and stumbled on your channel. This is my fist synth, so it's going to be a while while before I "git gud" at using it, yo make it look effortless. How long have you been using it? Anyway, thought I'd say hi. I'll def be following your channel in my Elektron journey. Any other creators you'd recommend? I've been following Cuckoo, BoBeats, Red Means Recording, Messy Desk and the like. Keep up the great work. This is clearest way -for me anyway- that song/jam structure has been laid out.
Hey Carlos, great to see you here and thanks for saying hi and following - I really appreciate it! :)
I've had the Digitone for a year now but I've tried it many times in a synth store before getting it so I wasn't completely new to it. But I definitely realise that there's still a lot to learn about this synth that's why it stays on my desk. The creators you mentioned are all great - apart from these I'd recommend Ivar Tryti and Oscillator Sink, they've great content on the Digitone and also other devices too. Cheers and keep on jamming! 🙂
Hello from Tallinn, Estonia 🏙️🙋♂️🙏How did you achieve such a chic picture and quality? What camera do you shoot so perfect video on? Thank you
Hey there, super glad to hear that! I trust on Fujifilm, using the X-T30 and mostly the 18-55mm lens for filming. Cheers!
Very nice ideas ! I’ve seen couple of your videos and I see you use the fill to mute some elements and add effects to others .. I have never tried .. but wondering how you do that ?
Hey Marcelo, thanks a bunch! To mute elements I'm using the reverse fill (the one with the bar above it) as a trig condition so whenever I hit fill mode the respective trig isn't playing. And for the effects I'm using fill trigs that have way stronger send effects on them as the normal trigs. Cheers! :)
@@MilesKvndra Hi Miles , thanks for sharing, cool approach I will experiment with it as it a very useful shortcut for transitioning ! Your videos are inspiring me to create e new live with my elektron gear ! Thanks for the inspiration!!☀️☀️👏🏽
@@marceloberges9017 thanks so much for the great feedback! Really happy to hear that my content is inspiring for you, have a lot of fun creating the set 🙌🏻
Waiting.
Awesome! 🙌
Waiting
Cheers! Till Saturday
Is the deep wobbly bass in the background achieved by some sort of an LFO?
Yeah there is an LFO on the filter cutoff that slowly fades in over time creating this wobbly effect on the bass sound.
are kick and snare sound in the same track?
Hey Alejandro, yes there is a little trick to make this work, I show it in this tutorial (jump to the part about drums): th-cam.com/video/IYxzq8OBdQI/w-d-xo.html
Dabei für die premiere!
Danke, dass du dabei warst! :)
Why all the love for this device that has so few arps and a fatal flaw in the delay changing of patterns via MIDI program change?
I feel burned by all the folks who sing its praises, and I've had it for about a week.
But thank you for this video, I'll watch it and I'm sure I'll learn something.
Hey Timothy, appreciate your feedback and totally see your points regarding the downsides the Digitone definitely has. But I have never gotten my hands on an instrument that inspired me to make so much music, to experiment that much with sounddesign and to try out so many new things. I know I can speak only for myself here but that's just what I feel about the Digitone and why I sometimes praise it so much. 🙂 Hope you enjoy the video and did learn something!
This is great. Just curious as to how you’re making the drum track play slower (1.41 onwards)...and then on page 3 of the track it seems to only play up to step 5 and then carries on. Can you explain?
Cheers Liam! The track playing slower is because I set the pattern speed to 1/2 to make the pattern longer (128 steps). And the thing where it only plays till step 5 is because I made a cut in the video there :D No magic going on haha
waiting waiting
Awesome! See you Karlis