Came back to the Digitakt recently after picking up a Blackbox, and I find their relationship an interesting one. The BB takes care of a lot of stuff I miss on the DT, like slicing and synced recording (and choke groups!), but I think that despite - or possibly because of - the BB’s touchscreen, the DT still beats it in terms of usability, and I much prefer the DT for creative sampling. And sequencing, obviously, because the BB is still quite basic there.
As is often the case with Elektron gear, I find myself wishing I could fuse a couple of features into it from the BB. But I can’t, so I have to remember that the Digitakt is something of a playful machine, and in many ways a puzzle - it wants you to be hands on, and it wants you to come up with creative solutions. It’d be nice to be able to choke hi-hats, but you can’t. So I’ll do something like sample open and closed as a two-part chain, and use a synced LFO to switch them (or to affect the envelope decay on a single sound, etc). I probably won’t get the results I expected, but there’s a good chance I’ll get something more interesting.
It’s not a workflow you want all the time, and often you have to approach the DT with its limitations firmly in mind. But usually I find it compensates for them well enough. I also have a Mk1 Rytm, and I often wonder if the Mk2 is the ‘complete’ Digitakt - but it’s safely outside my impulse purchase range, which is probably for the best.
