Elektron’s Song Mode for Digitakt, Syntakt, and Digitone chains together patterns beyond the 64-step limit – and there’s some beautiful ambient music from a Syntakt owner to prove it. That’s not all in the OS update, so here’s a complete rundown of new features.
Reading feature lists is nowhere near as satisfying as chilling out to some beautiful “psymbient” sounds of a Syntakt planted on a lush, green forest floor. So let’s first tune into the music of substan’s “symbiont”. Develop features like Song Mode that users ask for, and you get wonderful music like this as a reward:
New in OS updates
Elektron was keen to tell us about Song Mode, so you might easily have missed what’s new in each of their so-called Digital Trilogy. In addition to Song Mode and bug fixes across the full line, you get:
Chromatic mode / keyboard mode enhancements: keyboard fold, additional scales
Syntakt, the youngest of the three, gets a lot in its first major update.
- Portamento (TRIG page, with settings in SOUND > SETUP)
- Pitch Bend Depth setting
- Note priority (LAST, LOW, HIGH)
- Legato on/off
- Velocity to vol parameter
- Filter env reset parameter
- Settings > Global FX/mix now set global parameters for the internal and external mixer and FX track’s amp, delay, reverb, and LFO pages. Wow is this a timesaver, as I found this was a lot of the menu diving in Syntakt 1.0
- Mute mode works with the browser open (whew)
- Digital tracks can be set to USB out in Audio Routing menu
Song Mode Tutorials
Here’s how the new features work. So you can really use this for arrangement and more complex chained patterns – also meaning this works nicely with a Syntakt or Digitakt alongside a modular or other performance instrument, since you can make a real, dynamic backing track.