Until recently, I treated the Elektron Digitakt as an addition to Ableton. I liked it, but I could never really figure out how to use it in my track-writing workflow.
Whenever I disconnected it from the laptop and sat down with it on its own, I could never get past a single loop. Something always felt missing. I kept thinking in terms of producing a finished track, which meant I immediately ran into arrangement problems. I felt uncomfortable, got lost in patterns, and eventually gave up. As a result, my Digitakt spent several years collecting dust.
The turning point came when I realized that it could simply be played as an instrument, with performance taking priority over production.
Over the last few months, I started spending time with it regularly, without a computer and without any particular goal. I would just create patterns. Once a pattern was finished, I would play a short jam using pattern mutes.
Before long, I had accumulated sixteen patterns. Yesterday, I connected my laptop, hit record, and simply played through ten of them. Before I knew it, an hour had passed.
Of course, I can hear rough transitions and mistakes here and there. But still - one hour.
It was a completely new experience, and it made me want to record another set and improve on what I learned from this one.