What do you need your boxes to do? For a lot of people, that’s making grooves, producing nice-sounding drums, manipulating samples, and playing sequencing – and then mucking about with them and breaking everything. You might call that a “drum machine.” You might call it, in fact, a “laptop.” But the faster mucking around gets, the more fun you’re likely to have.
On this scene, enter the Elektron Digitakt. Part of why I wanted to share Cuckoo’s friendly, accessible videos on the Elektron Octatrack yesterday was to help set the stage for the Digitakt. Does it do everything the Octatrack does? No, not quite – but it does do most of what the older flagship does, in a smaller form factor, with a nicer screen, and more accessible hands-on controls, and a much lower price.
So, in fact, you might even have missed that one of the things the Digitakt has borrowed from the Octatrack is the ability to play eight sequenced tracks.
And, sure, while the Digitakt doesn’t have the massive effects section from the Octatrack, it does serve the “play stuff and mess around with it, maybe without a laptop” use case.
Here’s that hands-on – in a video that’s “almost a tutorial”:
It’s a bit weird to skip to sound samples for a digital sampler (hey, it’ll sound like whatever you want), but here’s that, too:
And finally, here’s an extensive live jam:
More:
https://www.elektron.se/products/digitakt/