 Hello, oscillators in here. Portamento or pitch glide is kind of a requirement if you're going to make soaring leads and acidic bass lines. It's also a great way to add character to pad sounds. So it's no surprise that a long-standing feature request for the digga tone was that portamento would be added. And I guess about a year ago, Electron did what the people were asking for and they added portamento to the digga tone. Parameter portamento as well. It's great. However, the digga tact, I guess because of its lineage of being kind of a drum machine, even though we know it can be so much more than that, hasn't received that portamento update and I suspect won't. So today, what I want to talk about is how you can get portamento effects on the digga tact without having a dedicated portamento feature. We'll look at the mechanics of how it works and then I'll sort of propose kind of a workflow to put together sequences of portamento more easily and more quickly. So in order to pull off this trick, we're going to head over to the LFO page, which is often where we end up when we're trying to do cool things on the digga tact. So obviously, if we're going to be getting a pitch movement, which is what a pitch glide is obviously, but portamento is, the destination for our LFO is going to be tune. I'm just working with a single cycle waveform with a bit of filter modulation on it, but this will of course work with any sample that you like. So here we are. We've applied some tuning modulation and we get tuning wobble as one would expect. Now, to get a portamento type effect, we're going to have to change our waveform to what I think is probably the least often used waveform. It was for me, certainly. It took me a while to work out what this was really for. And that's the ramp. Now, the ramp you might think initially is going to be a bit like a sawtooth. It's going to go but it's actually slightly different. So if we apply a bit of depth, we might be just slowed down so we can hear it. What's actually happening with the ramp waveform is that it ramps up, it immediately drops down, and then it spends the same amount of time as it did ramping up, sat back at the original pitch in this case. So it's not quite the same as saw, which is always moving. It's also going the other way, but obviously we can reverse it by changing the depth. So one thing that we will often do on the dig attack when we're looking at our LFOs is that we will treat our LFOs as if they were envelopes. And we do that by switching the mode over to one. And what this will do is it will do one entire cycle of the LFO waveform and then stop, essentially giving us an envelope that starts when you press the note. So in the case of ramp when we do that, it's going to ramp up, drop down, and then essentially just hold back where it started. Very useful when we're doing stuff like exponential. But if we think about the ramp shape here, what we were just saying is that it spends half the time going up and then spends the same amount of time back at the base. So if rather than using the one mode, we use the half mode, we will only get the ramp and then it will hold for as long as we are holding our notes. And the depth is going to affect how far we slide. And the speed is going to affect how far we get there. And this essentially is going to allow us to fake our portamento. Okay, so let's work this idea into a sequence. Now for this, I'm going to set my multiplier to 32. You get a slightly better resolution this way, I think. And if we have the BPM 32 multiplier and then set our speed to 32, that slide is going to take the same length of time as a step. So that's kind of a good place to start. Obviously we can change the speed accordingly, but that I think helps us get going. So I'm going to set my depth back to zero because we don't want this to be happening on every single step. Necessarily. So let's hold us into just this real simple little loop here, which we're probably going to get sick of listening to, but bear with. Okay, so a little sparkly one there. So what I want to do in this sequence is that I want to have this note, which is up and this note, which is down. I want to slide up to this note and down to this note. So let's think about how we can apply our LFO parameter locked to achieve this. Now the workflow that I usually do, because I think it's easier to reason about it this way, is that I will write my pattern in and play in the notes as you normally would. So this is all in C, of course it's in C. So this is a D sharp and this is an A flat, sorry an A sharp B flat. If I wanted this note, this D sharp to slide up from the C, if you like, so we've got C. If I want that to slide up instead, what I will start by doing is actually coming into the source page and I will tune it down to its starting point. You can do this the other way around as well, but I think this makes it easier to reason about when you look at the notes that are actually in the sequence. So this is a D sharp. If I want to tune it down to C and now if we play now this note is playing as if it is a C. Right, now we're going to come into our LFO page and we're going to parameter lock the depth, which is going to slide this back up to where it should be. Now you would think that if you wanted to add three back onto the minus three that we've just applied to the tuning, we would set our depth here to also be three. However, if we do this over here, it goes far too high. It's going up to F sharp instead. Now the reason for that is that our, or at least I think the reason for this, is that our ramp waveform here is unipolar rather than bipolar and the depth when it's bipolar is the entire sweep of the wave. Because this is unipolar, I think it gets multiplied. I don't entirely know the rationale for it, but the practical offshoot of this is that if we want to go up by three, if you like three semitones, we actually have to halve that and go up by 1.5. So you have to do a little bit of maths. But now if we play this, you can hear that we've got a little slide there. Now if we want to make this slide more obvious, of course we can slow it down, so that means we're going to want to reduce our speed. And we might also want to make this trigger a little bit longer so we can hear the whole sweep. So if we want to make it even more obvious, we could of course tune this down a little bit further, so as we go down to six. And then we can have our depth at three instead. So we can play with how obvious we want to make this slide. So let's have a look at our other note here, this one, the lower note. So again, what I'll do is I'll come into the source, and this time I will tune it up by two, like that. And in our LFO, I want to have the depth at minus one to go back down. And again, we can slow it down if we want to make it a bit more obvious. Might need to make it a bit longer if we're going to do that. And now we have nice little slides going on, little glidy 303 portamento slides. I'm not quite a 303 sound, but on the dig attack, without a dedicated portamento mode. But here's another interesting thing to consider. So on that previous example, the slides that we were introducing were sort of locked to the fact that we were playing in notes. The slide was starting as the note played, and it's all swooped up into the note. But what if you want to apply portamento or pitch bend to a note that is already playing? So here's just a drone kind of sound that's playing across the entire of the bar here. So what if we wanted to take this drone sound and actually have it do like a pitch sweep partway through. So I've got the LFO page set up in the same way here with my ramp and my half and it being sent to the sample. So say maybe on step 12 I want to start making it swoop down instead. Now if I put in a step here and apply my sweep, obviously it's going to go down by an octave so that'd be minus six because we have to halve the amount. Obviously at the moment when it's hitting this step here, it's starting my sample again. You kind of hear that it's killing the sample and starting again, which is not quite the valuable one. I just want to make the currently playing sample slow down like I'm slowing down the tape that's playing it back. Now in order to do that of course we can use our good old friends our lock tricks. So let's put down a lock trick here instead. So this isn't going to trigger our sample to start again, but it does allow us to start parameter locking the parameters on this sound. So let's apply our LFO here. So what's interesting when we do this is that we're not getting that glide we're getting a step happening. And the reason for this is that what's happening is that the depth of the LFO has been applied but actually the LFO is starting here it's getting to its half end point and at this point we're just modifying where that endpoint is. So this is with this LFO page setup, functionally the same as just changing the tuning of the sample. So what we want is for this lock trick here to start our LFO again. So if we come into the trick page if we look at the way that this lock trick is set up by default, this will be the same for all lock tricks, the LFO trigger will be turned off by default. If we turn this on we get our slide instead. We can stop our tape or slow our tape down partway through the bar without restarting the sample. Now one thing I've discovered dealing with this is if we make much changes to the LFO page so I've just changed the speed there. For some reason I don't know whether this is a bug but it turns off the LFO trigger, which is a bit annoying, but just be aware that if you're tweaking the speed you may need to come back into your trigger page and turn the LFO trick back on. Now of course because this is a trick, albeit a lock trick, we could also apply conditions to this as well and annoyingly when you apply conditions it also turns off the LFO trigger again so just be careful of that. So now we can have this not always slide down. Okay well I hope that was interesting and useful obviously you can apply this basic idea to create portamento in any situation but you can apply this basic idea to get that kind of ramping effect for any of the parameters of course. So it doesn't have to be for tuning for example, you can do this to have a different vibe to an envelope with the frequency for the filter, you could, it might be really cool to have the reverb send ramp in on a sound over time as well, things like that. Panning stuff from left to right, this is probably the easiest way of doing it as well. If you did enjoy the video then as always I would really appreciate it if you could give the video a like and make sure you subscribe to the channel especially if you're into electron stuff and digotone in particular because I can't quit them, keep coming back to them. If I have more videos it doesn't matter what new and interesting since I have in the studio. I will always find time to come back and talk about the digotact and the digotone because they're just that wonderful. As always thank you so much for joining me today and until next time, take care, bye bye.