‘Timestretching’ is the name commonly given to the process where software changes the speed of a sample without altering the pitch.

The Elektron Digitakt is crammed full of useful features, but sadly timestreching is not one of them. While the obvious solution might be to prep your samples on a DAW like Ableton Live, it is actually possible to get a vague approximation of the effect through clever manipulation of sample start times using the Digitakt’s built-in low frequency oscillator (LFO).

While this isn’t actually ‘timestretching’, it creates an illusion which makes your brain think that the music has actually slowed down or sped up. It won’t revolutionise your production methods, but this trick will allow you to create some cool sample flips on what is commonly regarded as a basic one-shot drum machine. That’s good enough, right?

Without further ado, a step-by-step guide to performing the trick can be found below. For those interested in how it works, stick around and I’ll go into the nitty-gritty of how your brain is fooled.

The Trick

To perform the timestretch trick, ensure that you have a looping sample which is under four bars long, although I personally find that one or two bars works far better. Set a BPM which isn’t too far from the actual BPM of the sample (this is just a basic trick; it won’t work miracles).

Step One: Place the sample you wish to ‘timestretch’ on the first trig of the sequence.

Step Two: Head to the ‘TRG’ page and ensure that the first step retriggers the LFO. This is vital as we want the LFO to start at the same time as the sequence.

Step Three: Set the wave of the LFO to ‘RAMP’ and set the speed to 1.



Step Four: Change the destination of the LFO to ‘SAMPLE START’.



Step Five: Change the LFO type to ‘TRG’.



Step Six: Set the depth of the LFO to 32.

Step Seven: Place a step on each of the trigs in the sequence. The LFO should alter the start point of the sample on each trig and make it ‘fit’ the sequence length. To make the loop sound right, simply tweak the LFO rate and multiplier.

Credit to Elektronauts user Strangelov3 for discovering this method. Their post can be found here: https://www.elektronauts.com/t/dataline-style-time-stretch-on-dt/41542/17

How It All Works:

Understanding how this works is the most difficult part of performing the trick. It’s tough to get your head around, but once it clicks then it should make everything far more simple and give a higher success rate.

Imagine that the sample is a long strip of card, cut into 16 individual pieces. Each section of card represents a significant part of the whole picture, each bit being an equal piece of the initial object.

While the pieces have a fixed length when placed side-by-side, what was originally a set length of card can now be reassembled to form another shape or size. This can be achieved by either overlapping the bits of card or placing gaps in between the existing chunks.



Again, imagine that these strips of card are slices of a sample. This shows how an existing loop can be rearranged to fit a different tempo.

This is how the LFO fits into this trick: its role is to reassemble the chopped up sample in a way which fits the length of the given sequence. While this can also be done via manual slicing, this trick essentially uses the LFO to speed up the trial-and-error aspect of this process. With the ramp LFO controlling the start point, adjusting the rate allows the user to very quickly find a way to reassemble these pieces of the sample into a way that preserves the key transients of the loop while either compressing of lengthening the information in between.

This is basically how advanced timestretching works within something like Ableton Live, albeit with far more complicated algorithms.

Now that you know how the trick is done, you can start thinking about how to manipulate the sample in other ways. Altering different LFO parameters can create some wild results and provides a great alternative to simply changing the BPM in a DAW.

Many thanks to MrDataline, who first demonstrated this trick on YouTube, as well as the many users of the Elektronauts forum who helped me to understand it.