The Original Digitakt Seven years after its release, the sampler and sequencer is still a highly capable device beloved by many in the music industry, but how does the new, almost identical looking model compare to the fan-favourite?
Internally, the Digitakt II is a significant upgrade in almost every respect. Unfortunately, it also comes with a significant price increase, from $799 to $999. Since you can pick up a used Digitakt for just $400, the choice between the two isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.
I spent a few weeks thoroughly testing the latest Digitakt and comparing it to the older model, and ultimately realized that for my purposes (and many others’), it probably wasn’t worth upgrading to the new version. That said, for the power user who always wants to try the latest and greatest, it’s a great piece of equipment.
Photo: Terence O’Brien
Endless possibilities
Physically, the differences between the original Elektron Digitakt and the new Digitakt II are extremely slight: the monochrome screen is white instead of yellow, the instrument-specific labels under the keys are gone, there are some new buttons, and some labels have changed, but other than that, the two are nearly indistinguishable.
It would be impossible to describe every feature of the original Digitakt. In fact, we should also briefly mention some of the changes in the latest model. This is an incredibly feature-rich machine, and a comprehensive description would take tens of thousands of words. Instead, we’ll focus on the most important features and changes.
Two big drawbacks of the original Digitakt were that it could only handle mono samples, and that the storage was rather poor even by 2017 standards. Personally I didn’t find the 64MB RAM per project (the equivalent of 14 minutes of mono samples) too limiting, but the 1GB drive storage meant that I ended up spending a fair amount of time actively managing samples. The new model largely solves the storage issue by increasing the RAM to 400MB (72 minutes of mono or 36 minutes of stereo samples) and the drive to 20GB.
The stereo sample support is great, but the main new feature I like is the increased storage capacity, partly because I’ll be using the Digitakt II primarily as a drum machine – when you’re primarily working with percussion, you don’t really need stereo.
The Digitakt II excels at handling melodic parts, and even comes preloaded with single-cycle waveforms so you can play it like a synth. However, the 16 sequencer tracks are monophonic, so to play chords you’ll need to use multiple tracks to sequence notes individually, or sample the chords. And despite there being five different “machines” (Elektron’s term for how samples are processed; one-shot, stretch, re-pitch, etc.), the results vary widely depending on the source material.
