Elektron Digitone One Pattern Jam (featuring IGS Volfram Limiter, dual 1176 clone)
The Elektron Digitone is a fun little machine. It is based on FM synthesis, a technique brought to the masses by Yamaha in 1983 with their DX7. The DX7 was monotimbral, but had 16 voices of polyphony. The Digitone, released 34 years later, is 4-part multitimbral ... but alas, it only does 8 voices of total polyphony. So, I challenged myself to do a jam using only one pattern on the Digitone, and see what could be squeezed out of those four parts and eight voices!
The Digitone runs through my freshly acquired IGS Volfram Limiter; an all-analog clone of the Urei 1176/1178 FET compressors. The Volfram is a full dual 1176 (while the dual channels on the original 1178 had to share a lot of controls), with added parallel mix feature. And it does the famous all-buttons mode, which I used here to add some grit. After that, signal goes through a RME Fireface UC into a Cubase stereo track. Only a tiny bit of mastering FX applied in Cubase (EQ, compression and brickwall limiting). A bit of camera audio added while editing in Premiere.
There are great tutorials on creating Digitone drum sounds by Oscillator Sink and Ivar Tryti. However, what inspired the drum part of this jam was a tutorial by a rather unknown youtuber called Mo chreach! which shows how to create drumparts using only a single Digitone voice: by using the four FM operators in groups of two, you can create a sound pool with sounds like Kick+Snare or Kick+Hat. • Get more drums for fewer tracks, trigs and...
Setting the drum track (Track 1 in this case) to one fixed voice of polyphony also allows muting/stopping drums by hitting any trig key in live mode on track 1.
Track 2 hosts the FM bassline; also, there are water drop-ish FM blips sound-locked to a few trigs, using trig conditions to play less often. Around 02:13, I turn down the AMP level to zero; this makes the FM bass disappear, while the sound-locked blips still stick around.
Track 3 hosts two very different sounds:
A. The FM bells which can be heard between 00:40 and 00:52; those will only play while the FILL button is pressed.
B. The big fat string pad chords which will only play while FILL is released. There is two variations of this sound: First, one with stronger filter resonance and a very pronounced filter sweep; second, one with less filter action and instead fake sidechain pulsing, created with a triggered upward-sawtooth LFO routed to AMP level.
You can see me changing the Track 3 sound to the first variation after having reloaded the pattern from the temporary storage around 00:27, to have it ready for the breakdown at 00:55.
Track 4 does the synth arpeggios in the final part. Those are not in the sequencer, I play them live; which has the advantage that I can still play them when the track is muted. Unmuting track 4 will bring up the (sound-locked) noise riser sound.
Also, the ocean wave sounds in the intro are four trigs on track 4, saved with amp levels of zero. Before starting the jam, I bring up the levels of those four trigs; then, reloading the saved pattern from temp at 00:24 will effectively mute them again.
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