OT is a freaking cool FX box. I plugged in my Electric Guitar this morning, straight into OT, no pre amp or anything and added a big effects chain in an attempt to sound like MK.gee and it actually sounded pretty close…
OT FX are great!
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FX quality depends a lot on user’s ears quality. There are albums in the 80’s that sound better than full equiped studio produced albums in the 2020’s IMHO.
The greatest lack is to not be able to have reverb AND delay on one track, but that is a CPU power question I guess.
The huge advantage is the CUE outs where one can use own’s FX as a Send. This alone tops many boxes on the market for me.
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Neighbor tracks ftw!
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There’s also that bug/exploit that allows you to copy a reverb from FX2 onto FX1, so you could technically run a reverb into a delay on the same track, not the same as the vice versa obvs.
If you set up a pickup machine on a very short loop and make it overwrite record from the cue bus you can use the cue level on tracks effectively as an internal pre-fade FX send. Might be useful.
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I was speaking natively. Those workarounds are not viable for me for a daily use. I don’t wanna sacrifice one precious track just to add an FX and the bug/exploit is not saved as far as I remember.
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If Elektron do an OT successor (please!) I would love to see a third FX slot.
By modern standards the fx are barely just ok… The reverb haven’t aged well tho…
OT can be a high quality and very powerfull fx processor, if you use recorders, buffers modulations and feedback.
People barely use theses possibilities and complain…
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OT fx are good. What makes them awesome is being able to modulate pretty much every parameter on those effects with LFOs p locks scenes… and slide trigs. Dont understimate that. And custom LFO shapes…
Oh, and parts. Dont understimate that either.
I’m a fan of the delay, dark reverb, phaser, flanger, compressor, lofi. The EQ and filter are brilliant.
Not forgetting neighbour machines for fx chains, which I use a lot.
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Neighbor machines are native. They’re a standard feature, not a workaround. I use them a lot if I need to stack effects – it’s very easy to resample if you need to bake more than 2 effects into a sound.
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There are individual effects that sound better at specific things, as mentioned by others, but it’s a great FX box, and mixer, considering all of the options for routing, the modulation, the interface (crossfader, knobs etc). If you for example want to expand it with a hi-fi reverb pedal, you can add it as a Return
I mean you can p lock whatever, design your own LFO, and then p lock that, and then tweak further with Scenes and the crossfader. Endless options.
I’m on my second Octa, (mk2 this time), and it finally clicked for me. Really looking forward to exploring it further and spending a bunch of time with it
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Oh yes. Thanks for the tip. Didn’t know. I shall abuse this! 
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I like em.
They are very bad
ass!
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Great find by @Kacper Reverb on FX1 slot hack
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I’m new to the OT and hadn’t taken the time to deep dive into the fx, was just having fun using them. So I just went through one by one and tested out all of the parameters and they sound fine. I don’t mean that in a bad way like they’re “just fine” but they’re digital fx, pretty much what you’d expect.
As far as I understand, a filter in dsp is always the same math and any “analog modeling” is just adding coloration in various ways. The filters and eqs all work as expected and are probably identical to any basic filter or eq in a daw. A phaser is an allpass filter with an lfo. It doesn’t sound like the most amazing lush analog phaser, but I’m assuming they didn’t try to model anything, it’s just a simple implementation of a phaser.
Delay is delay. Chorus and flanger are just made from short modulated delay lines. Again, there probably wasn’t any attempt to model bbds or anything, it’s just bog standard dsp code.
I’m not a big fan of digital reverb but I think they sound cool and kind of dark which I like. But I can see how if you’re into big bright Lexicon/Eventide style shimmer verbs with a million parameters the OT verbs are not going to work for you. But to me the fx sound as good as any stock daw plugins or built-in fx on a synth.
But I haven’t wrapped my head around the gain staging yet. It seems like there isn’t much headroom and that’s a place where things can quickly start to sound bad if you push fx parameters too far.
As far as sends and neighbor tracks, I think a major upgrade if they ever make a successor would be a full mixer on the input of each track. You should be able to set the level and panning of each of the four inputs and all of the internal tracks per-track. That way any track could be a send, you could create subgroups, and the whole concept of thru and neighbor tracks wouldn’t be necessary anymore.
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Abusing fx…
Formant
Randomize scenes
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There are no bad fx, only bad producers.
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@sezare56 that formant filter trick is cool!
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thanks for the good content.
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