Using the OT like a DT, with 8 one shot samples, one on each track, is the absolute last way I’d use an Octatrack. OT makes slicing/remixing loops fun.
What I’d recommend is write your drums on your typical drum machine and sample it to the OT. Slice the loop and put it into the sequencer. Then, start messing things up. Change the pitch/rate for a single step. Reverse a single step. Remix the loop. Set an individual step to have a crazy FX send. Then do the same thing with a melodic loop.
Using the OT as a one shot sampler is the easiest thing to understand, but it’s really not using the OT to the fullest
+1 for Max Marco’s videos! He has a YouTube playlist or two with Octatrack videos, so it’s easy to find them. I don’t know if I’ve seen them all, but at least half a dozen and they were all excellent.
They way I started using it is that I use it for loops.
What you’ll find when using OT in this fashion is that it uniquely changes loops to something entirely different from what you started with by massaging the loop with the LFOs and P-Locks.
A month ago I was gonna go with having the SP404 mk2. But OT is much better at structuring your loops and you can go places with it you didn’t think you would go.
The beginning of this clip is several guitar loops that I sampled from OP-1 and made into loops. The loops adds a lot of texture and forms the basis of the entire song.
Setting up the recorded to only sample from recorder 1 you can set the sample time to be really long and in 24-bits and still have space for other things.
Well this is how I fell back in love with it. When I stopped using it as a drum machine and/or mixer. Not saying I won’t use it like that in the future… but my main usage is now with loops
Then again you can and should use it any way you feel like? I mean 8 one shots, 1 per track, resample the beat and do what you said. You can start simple and go anywhere, or keep it simple if you want.
A lot of people fall into the trap of thinking they don’t gel with the OT since they’re not using the more complex features enough.
very true.
I often use it as a one shot sample player like a Model samples.
But when I need other options, they are available.
Sample chains are super convenient for that and sample selection is much more fun then, than filling up your sample slots on DT or AR for example
Still OT shines most with live sampling/resampling. There is no real alternative for livesets for me, just because of this powerful feature
i dont think anything else is really a self-contained mangling box the way the octatrack is.
i still sometimes get lost by just sampling a simple synth loop, then putting it on a flex track with 2 fx, then 2 neighbor tracks with 4 more effects. something like the phaser or eq effect frequencies being modulated by a super fast x64 saw wave lfo, then compressing it, putting a weird “ghost” dark reverb in slot one so it gets all glitchy and weird, and putting some AM on that with lofi
then i resample the resulting sound, put it in a flex track, slice it into 48 or 64 slices, sequence those (maybe even add random locks if i dont like my sequence, until i do), add a snappy envelope so each slice sounds more percussive but retains it’s texture and transient, add a filter eg to some lfp cutoff, make a groove, filter that while recording p locks into the sequence live, add 6 or so more effects, resample that loop, add a comb filter and some delay until i have something unrecognizable
i used to think the effects werent that useful, and while i would love more kind of frequency shifting type resonator/vocoder pingable style effects, the ones that are there are pretty incredible once you learn how to push them
and it really is limitless what you can do when you see it as a big mound of clay that you can keep re-molding into whatever shape you want. smash it, cut it up, reshape it again
put a rec trig down and play with scenes on that mangled loop, slice that up and re-sequence. it never ends
i love the quality, i love pinging the phaser and the filters, modulating the mod fx like flange and chorus with negative feedback. i love the param and shelf eqs. mostly i love the digital elektron filter. that sound it imparts is almost like squishy. always loved that, even before i owned my first octatrack. i could hear it in videos when someone would use it as a drum machine
its not muffled, but just a nice polish over everything that i really enjoy
also @strutter, max marco was a massive inspiration for me too. not sure i would love the octa as much if i never learned about resampling reverb tails for artifacts and recording an empty input for noise to ping filters for drum sounds. its nice for beginners who dont know much about synthesis when someone like that consolidates some of those more complex or just abstract creative techniques and applies them to a specific instrument & teaches you how to best bend that machine to your will by exploring those techniques
Did you make the loops with the OT? It always takes too much time when I try to make seamless loops with it, very fiddly to get rid of pops at the end of a loop if it’s continous sound.
the loop itself was made on the OP-1 i then sample that loop into OT…
im having issue´s with pops as well when it gets sampled into OT… but i massage the sample enough to get rid of it, be it with a filter and/or plate reverb with mix set to max or just tweaking the attack time.
i think the main take away for me when doing loops in OT is that it wont come out sounding the same way it came in. for better or worse.
in the case of pops i have yet to explore FIN and FOUT on REC2
Have you tried that?
Edit: sorry for the shameless self promotion.
but i remembered i did a 43 minute set (just for LUL´s) with just OT.
tracks 1-3 are drum patterns made on OT (one shots)
track 4 is my transition track and remix track
tracks 5-7 are loops from Nord Lead 2
track 8 is a master track
the way the set is structured is that i capture the loops on the remix track and then transition to the next pattern while the remix track are the only ones making any sound, i then start experimenting with adding trigs and do parameter changes on the remix track to remix the loop and just have fun and then i start adding in the next pattern bit by bit.
i had a ton of fun with this one. and it was another instance where i fell back in love with OT.
the reason im not currently using it like this is because i want to multitrack record my stuff for making more fleshed out songs.
But if im ever doing a live set this is the way i will go.
have 2 tracks with melodic loops 1 track for a small synth and then the same as above.
Yeah, FIN and FOUT and reverb and filter and everything. With a lot of fiddling I can usually get a loop sounding pretty good, but never perfect. And some loops are just impossible to make seamless. Which is why I bought a Boss looper. The problem is that OT doesn’t have per track polyphony, if it had the option to just make the end and start of loops go a tiny bit over each other there’d be no pops. I’m sure it would be possible to code in without polyphony, but it’s not going to happen.
Have you tried recording the loop a few bars longer than the original loop, or even double…then starting the loop further into the recording, so you don’t get pops from the loop beginning? Not sure if I’m explaining it right, but that’s how I usually do loops, especially when using effects (reverb tails)or long decays.
I have not! I mean I’ve of course made loops from longer samples (and yeah don’t remember there being as many pops), but have not specifically recorded a second or two extra and shorten it. Sounds like a potential solution, but doesn’t solve the issue when you’re live looping. I’ll definitely try it soon, thanks!
