Parameter locks and conditions: the Elektron soul

Hold a step and turn a knob and that step keeps its own value. Add a probability or a condition and the bar stops repeating exactly.

Hold a [TRIG] key that already carries a trig, then turn a DATA ENTRY knob. The value you land on belongs to that step and to no other. The display inverts the parameter you moved, so the held value is visible, and the trig key blinks red on a note trig or yellow on a lock trig. That gesture is the parameter lock, or p-lock, and it is identical on all four devices. Removing one is the same hold with a press instead of a turn: hold the [TRIG] and press the knob for that parameter. Sixteen steps on one track can therefore carry sixteen different settings of the same control.

What a lock can hold

The manuals draw the boundary in one line: the parameters found on the PARAMETER pages can be locked, on every type of track. That covers most of this course. Cutoff and resonance from lesson 4, envelope times from lessons 3 and 5, LFO speed and depth from lesson 6, delay and reverb sends from lesson 7, drive from lesson 8, and the FM ratio and index from lesson 10 are all parameters on pages. TRIG page 1 is a parameter page too, so NOTE, VEL, LEN and PROB lock alongside the rest. There is a ceiling on how many distinct parameters one pattern can lock. Digitone II and Digitakt II print 80, Syntakt prints 72, and Tonverk prints no number at all. The ceiling counts parameters rather than steps: one locked cutoff spends one of the 80 whether two steps carry a value for it or all sixteen do.

Two devices take the idea past parameters. Syntakt's SOUND LOCKS let a note trig call a different Sound out of the pool, and Digitone II and Digitakt II do the same under the name PRESET LOCKS. One step then swaps the whole voice instead of one of its controls, which is how a single track ends up playing a kick on one step and a rimshot on the next.

Build those three locks in the toy below. The default kick puts trigs on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13, and each one sweeps from 150 Hz down to 45 Hz. Click step 5 to select it and set TUNE to +7. That step now sweeps from 225 Hz instead, a fifth above its neighbours, and the ear stops hearing a detuned drum and starts hearing a note. Set step 9 to +3 and step 13 to −5. The bar plays a root, a fifth above it, a minor third above it, and a fourth below it, which is a bass line written inside one drum voice. The track's own TUNE never moved. Clear the locks on those three steps and the plain four-on-the-floor comes back.

Trigs that decide whether to fire

PROB is the other half of the lesson. It is a percentage attached to one trig, and it is rolled again on every pass of the pattern. At the default 100% the trig always plays. At 50% it plays about half the time, and a different half on each pass. Syntakt and Digitone II print the range as 0% to 100%; the other two print only the default. Put 50% on four of the eight hats in a straight eighth-note row and about six hats survive each pass instead of eight, arranged differently every time. This is the cheapest fix for a sixteen-step loop that sounds stamped out.

Trig conditions answer the same question with a rule instead of a chance. The manuals call them conditional locks, because they are set with the p-lock gesture. A condition tests where the pattern is in its own repeat count. The workhorse is the A:B form, where A is the pass on which the trig fires and B is how many passes go by before the count resets. At 1:2 the trig plays on the first pass, then the third, then the fifth. At 2:2 it plays on the second, fourth and sixth. The manual also prints 2:4 and 4:7 as longer examples. One trig set to 2:2 gives a two-bar phrase inside a one-bar pattern, at no cost in pattern length.

Walk the figure. The row is eight hats on the odd steps; step 3 is set to 1:2, step 7 to 2:2, and step 11 to PROB 50%. Pass one sounds steps 1, 3, 5, 9, 13 and 15 for certain, with step 7 silent and step 11 undecided. Pass two sounds 1, 5, 7, 9, 13 and 15, with step 3 silent and step 11 flipped again. The gap moves from step 7 to step 3 and back once per bar, for as long as the sequencer runs. What you hear is a two-bar phrase. What is stored is one bar of sixteen steps.

The rest of the condition list

• 1ST — the trig plays only on the first loop of the pattern, which makes it an intro rather than a repeating event. Digitone II, Digitakt II and Syntakt also carry LST for the last loop before the pattern changes; Tonverk's list has 1ST without LST.
• PRE — the trig plays only if the previously evaluated conditional trig on the same track played. The manual's own example puts PROB 50% on one trig and PRE on the two after it, so all three stand or fall on one roll.
• NEI — the same test aimed at the neighbour track, defined as the track before the active one. Track 4's NEI trigs read the conditional trigs on track 3. With no conditional trigs on the neighbour, the condition is never met and the trig never plays.
• FILL — the trig plays while FILL mode is active, which arms a set of end-of-phrase hits to be released by hand. Tonverk carries FILL inside the condition list; Digitone II and Digitakt II give it its own parameter on TRIG page 1.
• Every entry above also exists in an inverted form, printed with a bar over the name, firing on exactly the passes the plain form skips. Syntakt adds one entry the other three lack: a percentage condition inside the condition list, which is PROB in a place where it can be inverted.