Review: Elektron Digitakt II

The original Digitakt sampler and sequencer, despite being seven years old, remains an incredibly capable device beloved by many in the music world. So how does the latest model, which looks nearly identical, hold up to the fan favorite?

Under the hood, the Digitakt II is a significant upgrade in almost every way. Unfortunately, it also comes with a significant price increase to $999, from $799. With used Digitakts going for as little as $400, the choice between the two isn’t as clear cut as you’d expect.

I spent a few weeks putting the latest Digitakt through its paces and comparing it to the older model, and ultimately realized the new version is probably not worth the upgrade for my (and many others') purposes. That said, if you're a power user who always wants to try the latest and greatest, it's a fantastic piece of gear.

Photograph: Terrence O'Brien

Endless Possibilities

Physically, the differences between the first Elektron Digitakt and the new Digitakt II are extremely subtle. The monochrome screen is white instead of yellow. The instrument specific labels under the keys are gone, there are a couple of new buttons, and some labels have changed. Otherwise the two are nearly indistinguishable.

I cannot possibly cover every feature of the original Digitakt. In fact, I’m going to have to gloss over even some of the changes to the newest model. It is an incredibly rich machine that would take tens of thousands of words to comprehensively explain. Instead I’ll be focusing on the most important features and changes.

If there were two major strikes against the original Digitakt it was that it only handled mono samples, and storage was pretty paltry, even by 2017 standards. Personally, I didn't find the 64 MB of RAM (equaling 14 minutes of mono samples) per project terribly restrictive, but the 1 GB of drive storage did lead to a lot more time wasted actively managing samples. By increasing the RAM to 400 MB (72 minutes of mono or 36 minutes of stereo samples) and the drive to 20 GB on the new model, the storage issue is largely solved.

While having support for stereo samples is nice, I actually find the increased storage to be the main new feature I love. Part of that is down to how I primarily use the Digitakt II, which is as a drum machine. Stereo is just less of a necessity when you’re primarily working with percussion.

The Digitakt II is more than capable of handling melodic parts, and it even comes preloaded with single cycle waveforms so you can play it like a synth. But because the 16 sequencer tracks are monophonic, playing chords requires either using multiple tracks and sequencing the notes individually, or just sampling chords. And even though there are five different “Machines” (Elektron’s term for how a sample is handled, e.g. one-shot, stretch, repitch, etc.) your results will vary greatly depending on the source material.

Photograph: Terrence O'Brien

The Machines control how samples are played back. One-shot simply plays back the sample, either forward or in reverse, and allows you to loop it with a separate loop point. Werp and Stretch both stretch the sample to match the tempo of your song without affecting the pitch, though how they achieve this is slightly different. Werp chops up your sample and plays those bits back linearly. This can create some interesting glitchy artifacts that may or may not be what you’re after, depending on the project. Stretch fades between the grains of your sample to smooth out playback a bit. It can have its own unique artifacts as well, but they’re less pronounced than Werp.

Repitch stretches a sample simply by playing it back slower or faster to match the tempo. And Grid chops up your sample into equal slices. While this is certainly a great option for composing, especially things like hip hop, without the ability to manually tweak the start and end point of your slices it can be a little frustrating when things don’t line up exactly how you want them.

In short: There are a lot of ways to mangle your samples. Part of the appeal of the Digitakt has always been its robust sound design tools. The Digitakt II improves on them in every way. There are now three low-frequency oscillators per track instead of two, which allows you to create incredibly complex and unpredictable modulation in your songs. There are four new filters per track, in addition to the base width filter for two filters per track. There’s also delay, reverb and chorus send effects, overdrive, bit reduction and sample rate reduction per track, plus a master overdrive and compressor.

Sequencer

While many music gear manufacturers have started to catch up, I think Elektron’s remains the best sequencer in the business. The upgrades here are significant, though hardly game-changers. The company has doubled the number of steps from 64 to 128; there’s also a new Euclidean sequencer that allows you to trigger sounds based on simple mathematical formulas. The complexity you can coax out of it is truly impressive, especially with two pulses per track allowing you to trigger a snare drum, say, for a pattern that changes over time. When you combine multiple tracks that play off each other, the results can be truly unexpected.

Photograph: Terrence O'Brien

The things that made the original Elektron special—the trigger conditions and parameter locks—are largely unchanged. The former is a set of rules-based conditions for determining when and if particular steps are triggered. This can be as simple as certain snare hits sounding only when you hold down the fill button, or something more complicated, like a crash that plays only on the third of every five times through a pattern. You can tell other steps to play only if the previous conditional trigger did, or only if it didn’t. Then there are simple probability options like an extra kick that only has a 30 percent chance of playing. These allow a single pattern to have a lot of variety and evolution even in just 64 steps, and now that space for introducing subtle changes that keep your beat from sounding too repetitive is much greater.

Parameter locks allow you to change settings for a track on a per-step basis. That can be simple automation like opening up the filter on a bassline over the course of a pattern, or something more complicated like dramatically altering the effects on the note of a lead so that one note is soaked in reverb, while the next is drenched in chorus before ending a riff smashed into oblivion by the bitcrusher. You can even change samples on a per-step basis, so if 16 tracks isn’t quite enough for you, you could put both your kick and snare on the same track to free up the other 15 for other sounds.

Other Features

There are a host of other smaller tweaks and nice features that make the Digitakt II great as both a performance instrument and a studio centerpiece. For one, you can turn any of the 16 tracks from a sample track to a MIDI track. This means you can use the powerful sequencer to control other hardware instruments. The MIDI tracks have the added bonus of being polyphonic.

Photograph: Terrence O'Brien

Elektron has also added what it calls Trig Modes. Instead of each of the keys being a track, or a step in a pattern, they can offer 16 levels of velocity for a single sample (like the classic MPC sampler you might recognize in hip-hop studios) which is handy for creating hi-hat grooves. They can also be in Retrig Mode, where each key plays a sample at a specific rate, say 1/12, 1/32, or 1/40. Or you can spread 16 different presets (a combination of a sample and all of a track's settings, including effects and modulation) for playing multiple sounds into a single track live.

It’s also worth mentioning the Perform Kit Mode. Kits are Elektron’s term for a collection of the 16 presets associated with a pattern. In this mode, changes to a kit are not saved, so you can tweak and mangle to your hearts delight without worrying about ruining your pattern. Plus, it stops kits from reloading as you change patterns, so tweaks you’ve made to the bass will carry over as you switch from the verse to the chorus of your song. This is in addition to the control-all feature that Elektron gear is known for, where you are able to hold down a button and quickly mangle an entire pattern without ruining your previous work.

A Few Issues

It's not all rainbows and infinite possibilities, though. First, there’s the lack of Overbridge support. Overbridge is Elektron’s desktop software that allows you to control its hardware directly from a VST plugin and even stream multichannel audio from it. Basically no other company has anything that even compares to Overbridge, and it’s a big appeal of devices like the Digitakt and Digitone. Unfortunately it’s not quite ready for prime time. Elektron is working to bring Overbridge support to the Digitakt II, but there’s no ETA for when it might launch, despite a private beta having launched in May.

Photograph: Terrence O'Brien

Elektron also decided to stick with a USB-B port. What year is it?

Then there’s the big complaint about a lot of Elektron gear: the “workflow” and its steep learning curve. Many out there seem to believe its boxes are impenetrable fortresses of musicmaking wankery; others think they’re perfectly intuitive. The truth lies somewhere in between. I own multiple pieces of Elektron gear, including the Digitakt’s FM-based sibling, the Digitone, so I came to the Digitakt II with a pretty good grasp of the quirks and conventions of the Elektron workflow. Even still, it took me a couple weeks to start feeling comfortable with the Digitakt II.

A Familiar Sequel

At first blush, it can almost feel like Elektron was phoning it in with this sequel to one of its most successful grooveboxes. But, once you start poking around, you realize these seemingly small changes add up to a lot more.

The Digitakt II is a stunningly deep instrument with a unique and creative workflow that makes it possible to create dense, ever-changing sequences from basic repeating patterns. It can turn the blandest of samples into musical chaos, and even be the control center for your entire musicmaking life.

The big question you’ll have to answer is whether it’s worth $1,000 to you. Most people can get by just fine picking up an original Digitakt on the used market. And if you’re not coming to the Digitakt for Elekton’s sequencer, there are plenty of more affordable options that allow you to simply mangle and playback samples.

The Digitakt II is a worthy successor to the original model, and for some people, only the latest and greatest will do. For them, the choice is clear. For those of us who mostly use it as a drum machine, the older model will suffice.