Octatrack: Help me to love it

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#69

A couple things -

plays free. If a track is set to plays free (and you are not in any recording mode), using the track buttons 1-8 triggers the audio and buttons 9-16 trigger the machine. The difference is that triggering the audio will do as you say - play it straight through (and loop or not depending on the OneShot and TrigMode settings). Triggering the machine (9-16) means all the setting in the pages and all the p-locks apply and your track will fade out as desired.

Pickup machines - there are a lot of threads about them here. I suggest reading through all of them and then deciding if they are useful in your workflow. Some people love them, some do not, most folks try them for a bit, get frustrated and then end up using Flex machines instead for most of their work.

FX - personally, I don’t like them. I sometimes use the delays for the fun of it, but I have higher quality outboard and always have the OT outs routed to my patchbay for easy effects additions. I would have wished they spent the time and money on other features and used the code space and UI to make other aspects of the machine more full featured or clearer to understand.

Sonics - the OT was sold as a Dynamic Performance Sampler. It was not sold as a 1 for 1 192 KHz, 24 bit audio recorder. If you need perfect sampling and playback, this is not the device for that. The OT was designed to sample, mangle, resample, mangle more, and resample again. Can you get good sounding samples out of the OT? Yes, but it requires work and some would argue the results are not perfectly matched to the original sources.

Pops/fades/looping - no comments here since that’s something I don’t care about. Others have posted about minimizing the loop point pops/clicks, but again, if this is critical to your needs, the OT may not be the best choice. Can you make seamless loops? Yes in a lot of the cases. People will say they always have pop-free loops and it may be true for the kind of material they sample. For others, it’s frustrating and time consuming to get it perfect.

MIDI Catch - after reading through all the posts, I finally understood what you meant. The OT does not do this and never will. If you need this, you will have to write a buffer layer of software between your controller’s MIDI output and the OT MIDI input. Things like Lemur may work, or MAX/MSP or ctlr, or other stuff, but you will need additional stuff to implement this feature.

I hope this helps.

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#70

Rinzler im a bit confused are you using your field recordings by running them through the OT inputs or by loading them as .wav files into the machine itself?

I’m only asking because i too do not always enjoy the OT sound and sought many different ways to neutralize it because I enjoy djing with the OT and use either the pioneer fx on the club mixer or my own guitar pedals on send return if i want to alter the sound of professionally mastered tracks.

So again - if you are playing .wav files you’ve loaded onto the OT via disk mode and you turn timestretching off the OT does not, to my ears, colour the sound whatsoever. I really enjoy how clean it makes my samples sound for this reason.

But if you use the inputs - the OT will impart a sonic signature. You can hear it quite distinctly if you switch from DIR monitoring to a thru machine.

And often its not bad at all, but it can mean that I need to adjust some of my bass and synth lead patches if i take my gear out from my studio mixdesk and plug it into my OT inputs when playing a live set.

the only reason i ask is that the OT workflow can be opaque and confusing. I couldn’t make my OT sample for the first month I owned it. But having stuck to the device i am much happier that I invested the time in this machine rather than Ableton or a DAW as it really opens itself up as a live instrument and can quite easily put out a polished and professional sound. I played inbetween a traktor dj and a vinyl dj last weekend and my machinedrum kicks and tempest basslines were on par with everyone else.

In fact in the end it was the guy running his ableton live rig that had problems with sound quality because of his cables or soundcard etc etc…

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OT audio routing
#71

9 posts were merged into an existing topic: OT audio routing

#75

:elot:I HATE YOU
Oh but I really do luuurve you :heart_eyes:

#80

I wouldnt say you wasted your money…its more like you invested in something thats going to get better as you learn it. I’ve had mine for 3 years and it still surprises me with new ways to create.

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#82

A post was split to a new topic: OT audio routing

#86

This again???

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#87

Feature Request:
Elektron sends a personal therapist along with the Octatrack who stays and counsels the buyer through all their emotional torment until they know they want to keep it.:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

**Thread starter:
This is not personally aimed at you, just a joke as this seems to be a reoccurring theme. Usually if one doesn’t sell and makes it out of this phase, the OT tends to become one of their favorite pieces of gear…

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Convince me on why I should *NOT* buy an Octatrack
#89

Push the faders as high as they can go, so the pretty red lights flash. Everyone knows when the pretty red lights flash, it means it sounds better.

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#91

If you dont like it… I get The Octatrack

if you sell it Let´s Go

or change for a New K-Mix (Keith McMillen) plus $$$$ difference

#92

Only had mine a couple days but I like it :slight_smile:

I can see it has specific use cases. It might be dangerous to think of it as an all in one box - I think I prefer the Swiss Army knife metaphor. Project to project, it can take on new meaning and serve different purposes.

A lot of this always comes down to budget and pre-existing gear, how things generally fit into whatever studio setup is going on.

As an A4 and AR user, I’m finding the OT breathes space into the middle of those two boxes where previously things were getting a little tight. I can offload A4 tracks to the OT, resample everything for transitions, and personally I kinda like the OT’s fx, particularly with LFO’s and in combo with whatever fx on the sound being piped in.

As dumb as this sounds, thinking of the OT as an eight-track is maybe the most non-conservative approach to getting the most out of it. Maybe using it as a four-track or heck even a two track- gives you then an intense amount of options rather than the limits of the full 8. But again it depends on the project and studio.

Something I haven’t tried yet wondering if someone can confirm - what is the max neighbours that can be chained? 3 per side?

ie track1 -> 2 NEI -> 3 NEI -> 4 NEI?

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#93

Yes. Split into two. Tracks 01 to 04; and Tracks 05 to 08. Can’t have a Neighbor machine on Tracks 01 and 05 as no previous track to listen to.

Track 01 Static/Flex/Thru/Pickup -> Track 02 Neighbor -> Track 03 Neighbor -> Track 04 Neighbor

Track 05 Static/Flex/Thru/Pickup -> Track 06 Neighbor -> Track 07 Neighbor -> Track 08 Neighbor

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#94

You can use track 8 as a master effect, and also Recorders to add more serial effects. They can be set like a Neighbor :

Track 1, Nei 2-3-4
Record T4 with Recorder 5 trig, play it with track 5 with Recording 5.
Record T5 with Recorder 6 trig, play it with track 6 with Recording 6, etc…

You can Record Cue too, and make a kind of send - return effect.

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#95

You don’t have to love it.
If it never really clicked with it, you don’t have to force yourself at all costs, sell it and move forwards.

#96

troll

#97

The OT is the only Elektron I have ever owned, I sold my first one in 2014, and I’ll never do that again. At this stage, the only thing that I find to be somewhat problematic is the pitch shift algorithm is not very good, but it is there. Even Live’s looper device doesn’t have pitch shift without changing the playback speed of the loop.

The OT can be many things. I think one of the magical things about the OT is some of its ways of working as it applies to a person’s workflow seem only to emerge after a considerable amount of time.

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#98

Could you give an example of that?

#99

For me, an example would be this:

It took me a bit of time to discover how I wanted to link various patterns with different parts. Right now I’m usually not using more than four patterns per bank (each bank is a separate composition for me), so I’ve linked each pattern in a bank with its own part. But obviously I’ve still got 12 patterns left in the bank to work with if I have four patterns used. I don’t necessarily need to use them, but they are there, and my individual way of using this structure is still emerging.

Another example is the gradual process of discovery I’ve experienced with integrating the use of pickup machines looping my bass or my tanbur with OT sequencer and the various things it can do with both preprogrammed sequences and sequencing the audio I’ve just live sampled.

I hope these examples help.

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#100

What’s your workflow for sampling instruments? I have so far only failed… are you sampling while you play something else and then slice while you play everything together?

#101

you can have a pre-sliced flex machine assigned to the recorder buffer, so there is no need to slice the sample after sampling it :wink:

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