Digitakt: Nei locks and Lock trigs

My goal today was to work out nei locks. I played around and got the idea, the nei locks respond to locks in the previous pattern (nei locks in track 2 respond to locks in track 1). A little confused about the relationship of track 1 to track 8? They don’t seem to work like the other tracks. 

Did some research. Didn’t find the answer to the track 1 and 8 issue (edit: found an answer “ There’s not meant to be a connection, so what (I) observe(d) is normal behaviour (same with all other boxes)” thanks Avantronica link) but did learn that nei and pre locks only respond to % and a:b locks not to ‘normal’ trigs or other nei and pre locks. 

Played around with programming the Amen break using locks for the 4 parts on 16 steps rather than 64. I tried using nei and pre locks but in the end the most elegant solution uses micro timing to allow 2 trigs to share the step, with different a:b locks. This allows for example a snare hit to be in parts 1 and 2 but not 3 and 4. You can even use step 1 pushed forward into the previous part allowing 2 different at trigs on step 16. 

Also the lock trigs along with not_pre allows a trig to play in 3 out of 4 bars, just put the lock trig in the step before and set the trig to bit_pre. 

No idea if this makes any sense to anyone but I’m slowing getting to grips with the Digitakt sequencer in my head.