This page is read from MIDI Instrument Definitions, a Python library used in the author's other projects, in which every number is traced to a document its maker published. Its source is on GitHub.

Elektron Digitone II MIDI implementation

The MIDI implementation of the Elektron Digitone II: what it answers to, and the 164 controls it offers, on firmware 1.12.

At a glance

Firmware

This page describes firmware 1.12.

MIDI channel

Any one of 1 to 16.

Parts

Track, 16 of them: each on a MIDI channel of its own, taking notes and controls.
FX and Mixer: on a MIDI channel of its own, taking notes and controls, each note working what is listed for it below.

Voices

16, shared by the parts that play notes.

Note range

0 to 84: C-1 to C6, counting middle C as C4.

Velocity

Sent and received.

Aftertouch

Answered, of a kind its documents do not say. It sends aftertouch too.

Pitch bend

Not recorded.

Program change

Received and sent, with 128 presets.

MIDI clock

Sent and received.

Start and stop

Sent and received.

Control change

149 controls, in the tables below.

NRPN

Supported, and preferred to CC. 160 of the controls below have one.

System exclusive

Supported.

FX and mixer notes

Each of this part's notes works what is beside it.

Controls

In the order the definition gives them, by part and group. Under each control is the name a program calls it by, once pymidiinstrumentdefs.load("elektron/digitone_ii") has loaded them.

Track

Track

Trig

SYN page 1

SYN page 2

SYN page 3

SYN page 4

Filter

Amp

Euclidean sequencer

FX

LFO 1

LFO 2

LFO 3

CC val

Misc

FX and mixer

Delay

Reverb

Chorus

Compressor

External in mixer

Misc

Where these facts come from

Source documents

• Digitone II User Manual, OS 1.12, dated 24 September 2026, its user manual, read on 3 October 2026 (the file read).
• Digitone II - Elektron, its download page, read on 3 October 2026 (the file read).
• Digitone II OS Release Notes - Elektron, its release notes, read on 3 October 2026 (the file read).

How they were read

User Manual, 122 pages, the edition Elektron names OS 1.12: APPENDIX C: MIDI, printed pp. 112-117, which is the whole of the control map; and from the body, pp. 11, 15, 16, 17, 24, 37, 39, 47, 74, 75, 76 and 112. Elektron publishes no separate MIDI implementation document for this instrument, so the appendix is all there is. The support page and the OS release notes are saved here too.

THE APPENDIX HOLDS 167 ROWS IN 20 TABLES AND 162 OF THEM ARE BELOW, with two more from the body for 164. The five that are not are the external input mixer's stereo-linked names, which are the same five messages already recorded under their mono names: Input L R Level is Input L Level, both CC 72 and NRPN 2:30; Input L R Balance is Input L Pan, both CC 74 and NRPN 2:32; and Input L R Chorus Send, Input L R Delay Send and Input L R Reverb Send are the three mono sends the same way. One message whose meaning follows the Dual Mono setting, so keeping both names would make a panel draw two faders that move together.

IT IS SET AT TWO DIFFERENT LEFT MARGINS, which is worth knowing before reading it by machine: thirteen of its tables put the Parameter column at x 92 and eleven put it at x 64, every column shifted by the same 28 points. And the columns have to be found by position rather than by counting, because a row may fill two of the four number columns or three: three numbers on a row could be a controller with an NRPN pair, or a controller pair with an NRPN MSB, and those are different messages.

THE CC LSB COLUMN IS PRINTED ON ALL 20 TABLES AND IS EMPTY IN ALL 167 ROWS, which is a negative worth stating because the appendix's own introduction explains it: control change on this instrument is seven bits and nothing more, and NRPN is the stated route to anything finer. So no control here has a fine half, no row fills all four number columns, and three numbers always mean a controller with an NRPN pair. Both readings of the appendix found the same, and the extraction asserts it rather than assuming it.

FOUR GAPS AND ONE MISFILED ROW, each checked and each recorded as printed. The TRACK table gives Mute NRPN 1:108 and Track level 1:110, and 1:109 turns up two pages later as MISC's Pattern Mute. The REVERB table runs 2:8 to 2:13 and then puts its Mix Volume at 2:15, so 2:14 reaches nothing. LFO 3 runs 1:58 to 1:62 and then jumps to 1:70, 1:71 and 1:72 - forced, because 1:63 to 1:67 are VAL12 to VAL16 and 1:68 and 1:69 are the filter's Env. Reset and Key Tracking - where LFO 1 and LFO 2 are clean runs of eight. And Pattern Volume, CC 119 and NRPN 2:24, is printed inside the COMPRESSOR table between Makeup Gain and Ratio, outside that table's own runs of 111-118 and 2:16-2:23 on both axes. It is not a compressor parameter; it is kept in the group the manual prints it in, because the section it sits under is the mixer and the panel page it belongs to is the one the compressor is on.

LFO 3 IS REACHED BY NRPN AND BY NOTHING ELSE, all eight of its parameters, where LFO 1 takes CC 102 to 109 and LFO 2 takes CC 111 to 118. With the Euclidean sequencer's seven, that is fifteen of the 164 controls below that no control change reaches.

THE MAKER PREFERS NRPN AND SAYS SO, which is why nrpn records a preference rather than mere support: "due to the large number of controllable parameters and that the machines share the same CC values, it is not possible to control high-resolution parameters using CC. Instead, you should use NRPN messages for this purpose" (p. 112). The Digitakt II's appendix opens with one sentence and no such advice, so this is this instrument's own statement and not a house form of words. 160 of the 164 controls below carry an NRPN and 149 carry a control change.

THE EUCLIDEAN SEQUENCER'S TABLE IS CAPTIONED AMP, which is the caption of the table above it carried down, so its group is taken from the section heading - "C.6 EUCLIDEAN SEQUENCER PARAMETERS" (p. 114) - rather than from the caption. The Digitakt II's manual does the same thing three times over. A reader or a tool should key a table on its section and never on its caption.

THE SECTION NUMBERING, THOUGH, IS RIGHT, and that is worth recording because its sibling's is not. This appendix runs C.1 to C.12 with no number used twice, and the contents page gives the page of all twelve correctly. The Digitakt II's prints two sections numbered B.8 and two B.9, on the page and on its contents page both.

THE FOUR SYN PAGES ARE FOUR GROUPS AND NOT ONE, because each prints the same eight parameter names - "Data entry knob A (machine dependent)" (pp. 112-113) to H - and only the caption tells the thirty-two apart. What each knob does follows from the machine assigned to the track, which is why the maker names none of them: Appendix A lists the machines over seventeen pages and none of its parameter names is tied to a knob letter there.

SIXTEEN TRACKS ARE ONE PART AND NOT TWO, so the sixteen CC VAL controls and the audio-track parameters below are two maps reached on the same sixteen channels, never both at once. That is why NRPN 1:16 is here twice, as the filter's Attack Time and as VAL1, and why eleven of the CC VAL rows repeat the filter's and LFO 3's NRPNs exactly.

THE EFFECTS AND THE MIXER ANSWER ON A CHANNEL OF THEIR OWN: "FX CONTROL CH selects the dedicated MIDI channel that is associated with the parameters on the DELAY, REVERB, CHORUS, and COMPRESSOR parameter pages together with the master overdrive, both for input and output" (p. 76). That sentence is also why the MISC table's Master Overdrive is on the effects part while its Pattern Mute is on a track.

THAT SENTENCE NAMES FOUR PAGES AND THE MASTER OVERDRIVE, AND NOT THE INPUT MIXER, so putting the external input mixer and the pattern volume on the effects part is an inference rather than something the manual states. It rests on their sitting in the same appendix section as the compressor, C.10, and on the same panel page as it. Nothing else in either document places them, and the appendix itself never mentions a channel at all - every channel here comes from the body.

THE APPENDIX NEVER MENTIONS A MIDI CHANNEL, which is why 23 controller numbers below appear twice. The delay's CC 21 to 28 are also the filter's; the reverb's 89 to 92 are also the amp's; the chorus's Speed is CC 9 and so is the trig page's Portamento Time; CC 17 is both the filter's knob F and the master overdrive. On the instrument these are a track's channel against the effects channel, and the body is the only place that says so.

ONE NOTE ON THE EFFECTS CHANNEL DOES SOMETHING, AND THE PART NAMES IT. The release notes for OS 1.10 say "Added tap tempo via MIDI note, using G10 on FX CONTROL channel" (release_notes) - a note number that works the panel rather than sounding a pitch. The manual names notes so that "C5, MIDI note 60, being middle C" (p. 24), which puts G10 at 127, the last MIDI note; no other naming keeps G10 inside MIDI's range at all. So the effects part takes notes, reads them through a map of its own, and the map holds one entry, tap_tempo on 127 - a button, not a grid.

THE NOTE RANGE IS THE OUTER BOUND OF WHAT THE MANUAL STATES, over two bands that do different things. "Note numbers 0-15 correspond to notes C0 through to D#1, the leftmost octave. These notes will trigger the preset of track 1 through track 16, respectively (provided they are set to their default channels 1-16)" (p. 24), and "MIDI note numbers 16-84, that corresponds to notes E2-C7 (C5, MIDI note 60, being middle C) will trigger the preset of the active track in it's chromatic variations" (p. 24). Nothing above 84 is documented.

THE MANUAL'S OWN NOTE NAMES DO NOT FOLLOW FROM ITS OWN NUMBERS, and both are left standing. If note 0 is C0 then note 16 is E1, and the same page calls notes 16-84 "E2-C7"; the page's own "C5, MIDI note 60, being middle C" (p. 24) agrees with note 0 being C0. The manual warns that "there are several different naming standards for note names and their corresponding MIDI note values. Here, we use the same naming standard as the one used internally in Elektron devices" (p. 24), which explains the offset from the common convention but not the disagreement with itself. The numbers are what this definition records; the names are not.

NOT RECORDED: whether the aftertouch it answers to is channel pressure or per-note pressure. The instrument does answer to it - "Opens a menu where you can assign up to four parameters to the MIDI aftertouch command" (p. 39) - but no page in 122 says which kind, so the field says received and no more. The same page assigns pitch bend and the mod wheel the same way, and the pitch bend depth is a setting of its own: "PITCH BEND DEPTH Sets how much the pitch bend data from external MIDI devices affects the Digitone II" (p. 37), with no range given for it in semitones.

ALSO NOT RECORDED: the default controller numbers the MIDI tracks' sixteen CC SEL parameters carry. The release notes say "The MIDI machines SEL 1-8 and SEL 9-16 parameters now have unique default SEL CCs" (release_notes), so those defaults exist and changed at OS 1.10, and the appendix lists the VAL parameters that send the values but not the SEL parameters that choose which controller each one sends on. A player sets them, so they are a project's business rather than the instrument's.