Classic Jungle on the OT

Why I resisted attacking this genre for so long, I have no idea. I used to make stuff like this on much crappier kit many, many, many years ago…

This track was performed live on the OT with modest help from an A4mkII, a Digitakt, and sampled pads from a Minilogue XD.

The OT is just built for this genre. The advanced sample mangling options, scenes, LFO tricks etc are just perfect for anything involving breakbeats. Here I’m using a trick on the crossfader where I have a scene mapped to the last slice on the break, so I get a great glitch effect on the drums when I move it to the right.

Any jungle / drum and bass genre tricks you guys would like to share? Let me know, cheers

39 Likes

Really nice! I’ve just started messing with breaks on the OT for jungle specifically. Great to hear this and inspired me to stick with it as I’d sort of sidelined it as finding the lack of seeing breaks visually a bit difficult.

So far for chopping breaks I’ve kept it simple by using the start offset and generally if the break is 1 bar exact then start offset 8, 12, 16 etc seems to get pleasing chops. Saves me messing around with slices.

Interested to hear what you did on the right side cross fader. Can hear it in the tune, are you using retrigs etc?

2 Likes

Well done. Octatrack is indeed spectacular for these genres.

2 Likes

Love it! :elot: :heart: :elot:

1 Like

Nice stuff.
I did a bit of jungle a few years ago on my OT. It helped me learn the machine. Theres a few tracks on my youtube channel. All done before conditional trigs.
My tricks were,
-manually slice the breaks. Old school heads know this anyway.
-sample chains rule. I have one pad chain, one perc chain.
-One 808 kick sample goes a long way.
-manual filter tweaks sound better than automated ones.
-I had the most fun doing jungle just using OT and nothing else.

Here’s one of mine, plenty more if you care to browse my channel.

13 Likes

Excited to try some of these ideas

Definitely check out some Ned Rush if you haven’t already:

5 Likes

Love that. Nice vibe.

Never thought of pad chains. Popular in old Protracker days to make the most of less sample slots. Assume you mean one long sample of different pads and use sample offset to trigger?

Cross fader on sample start time for the break as well?

Thanks. Yes and yes.
I usually chop my breaks up into 8th note chunks, manually. This does a better job of preserving the groove of the original sample. Cutting to 16ths destroys it.
For pads I made a bunch of pad sounds in reason, then sampled them. Length varies, octatracks massive memory means sample length is irrelvant. And yes, i use chains due to the 128 slot limit.
I usually haveat least 20 odd complete tracks all in one project. Means I can play live very easily.

2 Likes

8th, yep. Me too. But sometimes I quantize and timestretch some chunks with my DAW though, so that I can slice with OT grid, and play normally or mangle without clics. May modify the groove.

Before conditional trigs this (and other tricks) was essential to get variation into the breaks. Now its super easy and basically cheating. In a way conditional trigs sucked a bit of life out of the OT… less need to play the octatrack… just set some conditions sit back and let it go.

1 Like

Really nice stuff man, thanks for the tips!

1 Like

This is cool, thanks for sharing! I’ve been playing with jungle breaks in OT and enjoying the flexibility of the timestretching for drums and sample chains. Not made a pad sample chain yet but I have multiples for kick, snare, hats, claps, bass etc. Really opens up the machine. Made them in Ableton Live - Operator is a amazing synth and it was fun chaining the best bass sounds I could come up with and using them on the OT.

1 Like

Nice! Love it!
What break is that? Or breaks😊

Sounds like the ‘Think’ break, pitched & chopped.

2 Likes

Yep it’s just a one-bar clip of the Think break, sliced to 16th notes. Specifically from Zero G Jungle Warfare vol 1, which has high quality samples of pretty much all the classic breaks. I used the DJ Equalizer on the OT to drop out some of the low end. (EDIT: also a touch of dark reverb, and with compression on the master track)

That zero g library is a classic : )

Great job on the mixdown and arrangement by the way, everything sounds on point. Really enjoyed this tune!

1 Like

So this is just a one bar loop sliced into 16 slices. The crossfader is set so that the start point is slice 16 on the “B” side. Because these are such quick slice points you have to be strategic with the fader so you don’t accidentally go full glitch.

I honestly recommend you try slicing your breaks, at least as an experiment. Use the “set linear locks” option as a timesaver and also try out the “random locks” option for inspiration on programming fills etc.