How to use OT in the best way

Hello pplz,

im quite new to the OT. Just have mine for some days now. And i have a general using question. Maybe someone has an idea.

I have some analog Synthesizers like Jomox Xbase 999 and TR707 and a DX7, aswell some digital like TB03 or Virus Ti2. Now im making music without a computer. Hardwaremusic. Therefor i have a Soundcraft mixe to mix all the audiosignal. When i did a track, i was using the direct outs of the mixer to get the single tracks out and aswell seperatly in my Audiointerface. So i could finish the track and have aswell all the single tracks for an eventually mastering.

Now with the octa i might understood that there are multiple ways to solve what i wanna do but i havent understood which one i should use hahaha.

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What is your question?

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Okay. So. If i make a song and i have 7 different drum sounds from my 707 and 999 i alrdy have 7 midi tracks full. just 1 left. so bassline. now i dont habe any left to sequence my virus or my dx7. even if i put the dx7 audio signal into the ot and use it from there its kinda limitation. and if i record and sample the drums with the ot i have 7 audio tracks full hahaha then another problem appears : how to get the tracks out by each by each ?

can you use the internal sequencers on the other devices?

i don’t think there’d be that much advantage to sequencing the 707 from the OT…

whereas the virus or DX7 would benefit from the midi seq capabilities of the OT.

just my thoughts on that.

yes. i can use the sequencers of the 707 or 999 for ex. But the workflow is kinda fcked up. If i make a track and use the 999 to sequence the drums from itself, i cannot capture it. the banks are so small. i would need to erase them afterwards. aswell as how i gonna record that the 707 should switch patterns

do your drums with your machine using the midi tracks on the OT. build various patterns with em and record them into single loops on various track recorders with rec trigs (or record them one by one on a single recorder). save all the loops, name them. now load them to static slots and play them back from a single track by using sample locks. use multiple tracks if necessary (for example if you wanna slice up one pattern and alter it in realtime).

you now have 8 midi tracks left for your synths again and you use just one or two (or 3 :slight_smile: ) audio tracks for the drums. that should do it.

[edit] if i think about it it seems that the Digitakt might be a good choice in your situation as well. Being an Octatrack lite the Digitakt could trigger your 707/999 and takes care about some effects. As it also just samples in Mono the Digi might be a good Drum Sequencer/Recorder anyway. I dont know your machines but do they support Midi-CC? If yes, the Digitakt might really be the Sequencer for them. So you keep your realtime control intact and you have the Full Feature set of the Octatrack left for your synths. Just guessing … might be an idea for the future :slight_smile:

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thanks for all the advices. sounds like a plan

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I like umonox’s idea of sampling the midi patterns into one track then moving on, but am wondering if any of your drum modules can use notes on one channel to trigger sounds? The rytm can use separate channels for each voice, or there’s really low octave midi notes that trigger each voice from one channel.
There is a ton of ways to use the ot, and usually multiple solutions from different angles to accomplish things…

If you do use the internal sequencers of the modules you can easily start sampling the patterns and saving them on the ot as drum loops…

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Yeah i like it aswell. The thing with this method is, that i cant get the drum audio out of the ot seperatly. For ex. for mastering it would be useful to have the BD as one track and the HH´s as one same with clap or toms. Since the OT has only 4 outputs in total. Now i was wondering if its possible that the ot make single audiotracks (in full length) from the 8 audio tracks? So it would be possible to take the finished audiotracks from a song directly from the cf card. but if the ot doesnt make full audiotracks (in full length) of the 8 audiotracks i need to rebuild the whole song again on the laptop, beside in both cases i wouldnt hear the drums while recording hahaha maybe just the approach that i think of is wrong dunno.
@Open_Mike yes. my drum modules can be triggered from a keyboard via one midi channel. but still i can layer only one drumsound on one midi track. i would need nearly all my midi tracks for just finish the drums. and then im missing bassline, dx7 and virus midi tracks.

hmmmm

There’s 85 megs of RAM shared between flex samples and recorder buffers, with some options of how you want to split it. If you used it all for recording you would get about 5 1/2 min at 24 bit or 8 min at 16 bit. This would be split over 8 recordings and any samples you have loaded in the flex list will decrease the time more. So for example if you had 4 thru machines and 4 static tracks, the most you could record would be a minute of each at 16bit, or 8 minutes of one (or the sum)of them.
About the one channel drum triggering, I was wondering if you could perhaps trigger several different sounds on one midi track, and just use a few midi tracks instead of all of them for separate sounds…

Honestly if you just got the OT I wouldn’t be trying to nail the workflow from empty project to finished mastered track, there are tons of ways to do things and your first ideas without knowing the machine will probably not be ideal. You will have a better idea of how you want to flow after you have experimented with the many options of the OT and have read the manual multiple times.
If I were you I would just have fun and experiment for now, think about tracks later…
Enjoy!

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i sample every synth into the octa. if xbase have no internal seq thats a problem. so a digitakt or a another octatrack or a pyramid would be an option