Hi all, I’m struggling to create polished tracks with the Octatrack. I love the workflow and sound design possibilities of the Octatrack, but I’m struggling with the mixing. The mix always seems to be slightly off time when I bounce it to Ableton.
Is there a better way to approach mixing and finishing tracks?
What is off time? How are you bouncing to Ableton? Master track or recording each track into Ableton to be mixed?
If it is sounding ‘off’, do you have ‘Warp’ turned on for long audio files?
I’ve been trying to use this
But the slight delay when bouncing it really bugs me.
I would like to be able to mix it within the Octatrack and then just bounce the whole thing and master it in Ableton. But with only 2 effect racks I’m finding this difficult.
I’m wondering whether getting good at resampling within the octatrack is the answer? Interested in hearing what other peoples workflows are.
Just read that link, having not heard of it before. Seems like a lot of effort. If i found myself going to that much trouble i’d probably be questioning whether the OT is the right tool to acheive what i want.
Difficult yes but not impossible. It would be a lot less hassle to try and get the mix right inside the OT and then bounce out the stereo (or do the stereo and cue outs trick, giving you 2 stereo pairs) than the insane hoop-jumping excercise that this seems to be. I’ll be honest, im an OT agnostic, ive had i think 3, and there was stuff i loved about it and stuff that i hated. At one point i was totally bent out of shape about the lack of being able to capture individual stems for ‘proper’ mixing in the DAW, and tried loads of different ways to get around that, with varying levels of success but a constant level of frustration. In the end i resolved to just focus more on mixing in the OT, record a good stereo mix and move on. Once i was at peace with that, and more importantly once i understood that the OT isnt a hardware DAW but a performance instrument in its own right, i was able to enjoy what i was doing and dare i say get a few good results out of it.
Hey thanks for this good to know im not the only one.
Thats what I want to achieve, just mixing within the OT and bouncing the whole thing. Was there any tutorials or anything that helped you get comfortable mixing in the OT?
I get the impression most people have gone up against this when they first get an OT
Tutorials- not really, just used my moderate knowledge of mixing, dynamics and all that, tho theres doubtless lots of stuff on youtube on the topic of mixing in general. Someone else here might be able to recommend some good ones perhaps, or theres probably a thread or two on here already as ive definitely seen this sort of thing discussed here in the past
Did you try to record internally with OT recorders ?
You can record 8 tracks at once (1m04 max), or 1 track (8m28s max), if Flex slots are empty…
Quite often I’ll have a separate OT part set up just for mixing content. This will have the samples and stems set up with a bunch of eqs/filters in each track.
I’ll sample all of them after I’m happy with the mix, and import these samples to a separate part, we’ll call it part 2.
This new part, part 2, will have all the live tracking/performance FX like comb filters, reverb, delay etc, but uses the EQd samples so everything’s already sitting nicely in the mix prior to my live shenanigans. If things aren’t sitting nicely, or I notice headroom being munched by overlapping frequencies, I jump back to part one, tweak the offender (let’s say the bass) by notching out or boosting frequencies, resample, and load a copy of part 2 into part 3, replacing the offending bass sample with the newly sampled and EQd bass on part 3.
Now I can A/B part 2’s bass against part 3 to ensure I’ve I actually improved things instead of just making it worse, which can easily happen. If it’s not right, back to part one, retweak, sample, save, check part 2 against part 3 again.
This might seem like a bunch of work, but honestly, sampling takes seconds, and copying/jumping between parts takes seconds. And it’s nice to have a way to revert all this by just going back to part 2 if part 3 has been wrecked by my tweaks.
No haven’t tried that I’ll look into it. Then do you just connect your usb to laptop and drag the files over to your DAW?
Think this is what I’m looking for. So you’re not restricted to 2 effect racks this way as you can iterate over the samples. I need to go back and review parts. Thanks for this very helpful.
Yep, it is easily the best way of doing this. The other option is buying a sync clock and doing it that way, but that ca be expensive.
The internal recording trick makes the OT my favorite hardware sampler for jamming, getting ideas and then dumping them into ableton for arrange/mix.
Not a problem, glad to have helped. One thing, if you do like this workflow, I’d recommend setting up your “mixing part and pattern” on the 16th pattern of a bank, and use part 4 for this.
It helps as you’ll always know to jump to pattern 16 on any given bank to do your “pre-mixing”, and all your other patterns in the bank will default to Part 1, which will be your baseline part with all of the premixed stems.
This helps stop you from accidently fucking up your meticulously tweaked part when you jump to a new pattern in the bank 
. (I’ve done this before, god I wished the OT had a quick save the same way the digiBoxes did! Saving parts is a wee bit fiddly, I’ve defo nuked one or two before by being too hasty.)
It’s funny, that’s where I keep the messiest stuff on my OT projects 
I use the last couple parts of the last bank to do crazy sound design weirdness and resampling madness. Like if I were to share an OT project with someone I would say “just don’t look at the last bank”! Hahaha
It’s the same principal though: keeping arrangement/mixing separate from other things can be helpful
How do you record all 8 at once? Is it using record trigs?
I typically just a do a few tracks at a time and I work the crossfader so I can get good variety in the takes.
Oh, I just had a memory of another elektronaught mentioning this somewhere, I can’t remember the thread…
I’ve never done this, I don’t really have many VSTs that can do things that the octa can’t perform, but if you have a fancy compressor flavour for a snare, or maybe want to add the effect of a guitar cabinet or something? Just need to bounce the file with the same name, in the same location on the CF card. There is apparently no risk of file corruption due to the CF card acting like a USB drive, but I’d still be extra careful not to knock the usb cable out if you were to do this.
You can use Neighbor tracks for more effects at once.
I’ll use 3 Neighbor tracks regularly, just for drums.
With Parts you could set up a way to mix tracks, bounce them within the OT and more.
Holy crap, this gave me a headache, boy that’s convoluted.
For the delay that you are noticing, this would be helpful How To Solve Hardware MIDI and Audio Latency Issues In Ableton Live - Attack Magazine
If you’re using clock from your DAW, don’t!
USB MIDI interfaces all have timing that ranges from barely acceptable to unusable. You’re better off using the OT’s internal clock and lining up the tracks by hand. A pattern with a couple short beeps made out of a single cycle waveform (a triangle wave down in the 100Hz or less range is good) so you can use it as a reference should get you as close to sample-accurate sync as the OT can do. MIdI from a USB interface won’t. You can start the OT from your DAW for each pass to get it close, and then line up the first zero crossing of the first beep in each pass to get it sample-accurate.
The second post here explains the usB problem well: https://www.midi.org/midi/forum/4025-jitter-and-latency-usb-firewire-thunderbolt (old, but not much has changed since it was made).
It’s not the fault of Elektron or whoever made your interface (it’s not even really the fault of the USB spec, it doesn’t HAVE to be this way), it’s the fault of how MacOS or Windows or Linux or BeOS or whatever multitasking operating system you use handles USB interrupt requests, and a few things about the original MIDI spec. There are a handful of recent interfaces (all MOTU I think) that use proprietary MIDI timestamping (under specific MacOS versions only) to help work around the USB problem but you’d probably know already if you had one.