Taking our MIDI gear offgrid: Stolperbeats and Digitone

video upload by Making Sound Machines

"Finished a chilled weekend with a nice Sunday evening jam! Stolperbeats is heard here MIDI sequencing Elektron's Digitone 4 voice FM synth, a secret Making Sound Machines Eurorack prototype called Percussive Maintenance as well as Fred's Lab's cheeky little paraphonic voice called Zekit. If you haven't already, go check out the DIY workshops at Superbooth 2022 - where you can actually build a Zekit yourself!

Stolperbeats, roughly translating to 'beats tripping over themselves', is a drum trigger sequencer designed to create shuffled beats influenced by artists like Flying Lotus, Hiatus Kaiyote and J Dilla. We've always been fascinated by taking our beats offgrid to give them more fluidity and life. This module allows you to easily dial in and seamlessly switch between all the shuffle, feeling and groove we would, in the past, painstakingly nudge together in a DAW.

Stolperbeats' timing is set to Clave, a special mode where the accents in a 3:3:2 rhythm are fixed "on time" and the rest of the notes shuffle around that. The idea came when we chopped up some Modeselektor beats and started to add swing to them.

The Elektron Digitone acts as a sound module here, receiving Stolperbeats' triggers as MIDI notes - channel, pitch, velocity and note length can be adjusted per track to map to any MIDI capable drum machine or synth. The MIDI is split using the incredibly handy Meeblip cubit to target an extra bass voice on Fred's Lab Zekit. Of course, you can still patch the triggers into Eurorack at the same time, so we whipped out our Percussive Maintenance drum voice to add a kick and some hihats.

While Digitone's internal sequencer is not running in this sketch, Stolperbeats still sends a MIDI clock signal so the tempo synchronizes across the two machines. Enrica uses the built-in keys to live-transpose one of the tracks and play a shuffled melody on top of the sketch. We're very excited about Elektron 's new Syntakt by the way, that looks like a perfect match for Stolperbeats."