How much do you REALLY love the Octatrack?

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#72

Welcome. And I was wrong, not almost two hours, three hours 4 minutes.
Excellent deal.

@Open_Mike @Supercolor_T-120
When a longtime friend and musical collaborator suggested Octatrack to me three years ago I was put off by the price of the unit and didn’t really invest any time in reading forum chatter. Two years later I had my Ableton setup and had done a few gigs and sessions and was lukewarm on the results… flexibility was great, but i felt immediacy and stability were always questions…
So I looked into the OT vid’s, read the manual, and started reading the forum chatter, and quickly realized my buddy was right.
The MPC could do some of what I wanted, but the OT could offload all of what I wanted the laptop to do and offered some other mojo that, no shit, synergized my equipment into something greater than the sum of the parts.
This is why I love my OT.

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#73

Just bought it. Wow 7$ is pretty cheap Jesus Christ. Cant wait to spend some time with this.

this thread has me thinking a lot more optimistically now about what the OT can do and makes me feel less claustrophobic which I know seems silly. Thanks again everyone for the amazing responses. Cant wait to look back on this thread and laugh.

So much OT love out there. WOW!

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#74

Thanks for this. Im gonna try this cross fading idea. Need something like this to keep me occupied while I change beats on the Tempest.

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#75

When you say programming which parts of the OT’s design are you referring to exactly…

#76

There’s some real magic that happens when the beats of the previous song start to intermingle with the beats of the next song - especially in the hihats and percussive sounds. I usually mute/filter out the kick of the either the old pattern or the new pattern so you don’t get overlapping heavy kicks. However, sometimes the phasing and mixing of the kicks can accidentally sound cool during a song transition :smiley:

The best thing about OT is the happy accidents.

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#77

Pretty much all of it besides playing music… Setting up trigs on tracks, plocking, slicing, making scenes, rearranging slice remixes, designing arps and lfos, pattern/part creation in general…
I’m loop/realtime sample based so my outcome always changes by what I sample. I don’t do anything involving creation of trigs or plocks or scenes or anything when jamming, I just use what I already have layed out as a jam station that takes my loops and samples in all directions…
Here I speak of this a little:

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#78

For me, it really started to click me when I STOPPED using any loops at all.

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#79

In a way I’m actually GLAD I took the plunge without reading much forum chatter, because all the talk of bugs might have scared me off. I’ve hardly encountered any at all, and none of them have been major.

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#80

Another thing is that even though I’m into the OT, I totally understand the folks that don’t like it. It’s pretty odd, I love the way it works but I’m pretty odd myself…
I try to tell folks how to use it to do what they would like, but if they still don’t jive with the workflow I completely understand and there’s not much you can do about that except use another device, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s most definitely not for everyone…
It’s a super geeky device, not everyone wants to calculate music, but once you do you can definitely jam away…

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#81

Yeah, I think Kyma or Kurzweil K2000/2500/2600 are really good comparisons here, insofar as all three are the sort of thing that will either make you totally reconfigure the technical side of your process an discover all kinds of new ways of working, or they’ll just not fit at all. Both are valid, but I have a hard time imagining beigng neutral on any of those machines, personally. I’ve known two people who went down the Kurzweil rabbit hole and it’s very similar to my experience with the Octatrack (and very different for what has happened with people I know who went Eurorack, which is just as transformative if it clicks, but is also a bottomless pit where the OT or a Kurzweil or something like that appeals because it’s more of a closed system with its own internal logic that still manages to create almost limitless complexity out of what is - compared to the modular or computer music worlds - a pretty simple, limited set of tools.

Eurorack an open ended computer based environment like Max/MSP or similar is like looking out into the universe, the Octatrack is like a fractal curve that contains an infinite amount of one dimensional space in a finite (and arbitrarily small) amount of two dimensional space.

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#82

Agreed 100%. I stopped using loops, loaded up a bunch of single drum hits into the audio pool and got busy. Everything made a lot more sense to me when I did this. That process really pulled it all together for me. I highly recommemd this approach if you newer users are lost a bit and not feeling as if you are as productive as you had hoped.

I also love the Kurzweil approach and still own my K2000 I bought new close to 20 years ago.

#83

Yeah what’s funny is sometimes you watch how people work and it’s Sample Loop and One Shot, No movement just static sample sequence… and they find the OT too complicated. But their workflow are dead simple, Load Sample in Audio Pool, double clic on the track left click choose the machine (ok your music is simple go static) Load the sample, put trigs. END.

What’s so complicated :stuck_out_tongue: …

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#84

I think the universe breeds OT musicians and non OT musicians…
We’re either one or the other and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Sometimes we have a hard time understanding each other, what’s absolutely genius for an OT lover is a nightmare for a non-OTer…
Sometimes it takes a bit to figure out if your an OTist or not…
Either way is perfectly fine, there’s no reason to need to like the OT if you just don’t…

#85

There’s something to this which isn’t as bad as it sounds. It doesn’t mean your limited to what you can do, it means the OT has another way of doing the same thing which at first isn’t really apparent or intuitive, but later makes a lot more sense and then clicks.
You end up with the musical idea you were after, just using a method that no other machine/software uses…
The more you get used to the method, it turns from a roadblock to an enabler…

There’s also something about using any piece of gear towards its strong points. If your willing to go more in the direction of what the OT excels at, the music although of a slightly narrower scope, can be more exciting and different, with still plenty of room for diversity and uniqueness… I have an OT so I’m gonna make it do OT stuff, not stuff that other things do, and not just like a DAW, this thing has some tricks I really enjoy that are special to it so I run with those. If I didn’t like its tricks I probably wouldn’t use it, but since I do I try to make them shine…

#86

Yeah, 100% on that, and I might not have been clear, for certain things it is fantastic, but for what I do, bread and butter stuff comes out much more easily on an mpc type platform. And the beauty of the 2 boxes system for me is that you get out of each other’s limitations.
Honestly, I come from a background where I want to make my electronic gear fit around my guitar playing so sometimes the octatrack doesn’t work so well for me in that sense.
But it also opens up stuff that would be impossible otherwise in hardware.
I still think it’s a dr octorex on steroids in hardware.

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#87

I decided somewhere along the line I’m willing to adapt my playing to fit with the machines, less stressful for me and just easier to flow along… No right or wrong though, every musician has their methods…
I haven’t heard about this Dr. Rex :thinking: I’ll have to investigate now!

#88

It’s a reason rack thing, quite capable imo.

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#89

Wait… you can Label tracks?

#90

… using the appropriate paper and tape, or adhesive labels, yes!

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#91

Heh, underrated comment

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