Thank you all for your comments and suggestions, especially @koen.kaptijn for his video. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any of this to work the way I wanted: probably because I did something wrong - I’m not the most advanced VCV Rack user out there! 
But after few beers in the evening and a morning coffee, I found the solution that works exactly I want it to. Use two counters: one for counting the ‘notes’ and one for the gate.
In the scope, red lines are the triggers for the note selection, and green line is the gate for the recorder. Left side Push starts everything.
Digitakt_4.vcv (1.8 KB)
-k