I realized I’ve just scratched the surface of the OT after watching this video:
My OT mk1 is definitely a keeper now and I’m going to buy a Blofeld to pair with it!
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Even if it didnt have the quite literally bonkers midi arp, the OT is a magic machine.
Glad you decided to keep it. It just keeps unfolding.
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The Octatrack is an instrument. I’ve thought about making a ranting topic about this a few times…
Would you sell a guitar back because you can’t shred like Joe Satriani after a few hours with it?
Same mentality… The more you practice the Octatrack the more it opens up and the more you realize all it can do. I used to complain about being stuck in four bar loops but then I started using per track scaling and that went out the window.
It just takes practice. Half hour a day. Hour a day. Whatever. Muscle memory begins to kick in. You start going from thinking about what you want to do to just doing it. Resampling changes everything. Ever heard a recording of birds mixed with piano mixed with spoken word sliced up and slowed down and playing random bits? Me neither. Sounds fun.
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Totally mate.
When I got mine 4 years ago I transfered a small folder of samples from my computer. Each sample is a 16 bar chunk of an unfinished song from when I was using Reason to make music.
4 years later I am still using those same samples and constantly finding new sounds. Among other projects… live Lyra with feild recordings , chopped up vinyl samples and live saxophone… 
After 4 years I have only used 9GB of the 16GB card it came with.
And yes, the midi side of it…bonkers!
Other machines come and go, octatrack remains. Literally endless!
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That is precisely why I have stuck with it. Won’t need to buy new gear because I won’t run out of OT uses.
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Now I understand what people mean when they say this machine / instrument is very deep…
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Oh great! Another thread about how awesome the OT is? I say to hell with it…
Jk. The OT is freaking amazing and no amount of threads will ever be able to describe its awesomeness! It’s awesome. Like earth shatteringly, life-changing awesome. Like I can’t live without it. If I lost it or someone stole it, I would replace it immediately and feel bad for the person who took it because they’re gonna be stuck in OT purgatory for at least 2-3 months trying to figure out what they actually stole. Bananas 
Seriously.
The arp? Who in god’s name conceived this thing? I spent like 2 hours yesterday creating an arpeggio and I still don’t understand how I did it.
The OT has changed the way I make music. Once it clicks you’re like, holy hell!
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I can picture that
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Max videos are great and also helped me see my OT in a different way
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I haven’t touched my OT in weeks, possibly months now. I’m cool with that though as I can actually sense the need to use it building! Having a lot of fun with just Push, Live and Omnisphere 2 right now. Loads of fun in fact. But, few things beat sitting in my study with the OT on a dark winters night just creating sometimes insane, sometimes shit, always fun music on it.
I’m probably at the stage that I’m proficient enough that I can pick the OT and get going very quickly on it these days. No more half hours wasted working out what the hell I’m doing. So sometime soon, I will be pulling the OT out and going for it again. I might make another effort to work with it and Live again - record some random stuff out of the laptop.
I do still dream a true next gen OT will arrive one day and will bring OB. For how I work, that would be outrageous fun, but as is it is a fantastic device.
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The arpeggitor is great but it’s even better if you’re using it to control a synth that also has its own built in arpeggiator.
Only thing I wish the arp had was customizable quantized scales, or at least a useful variety of presets, because even accounting for modes just having major and minor isn’t really that much to work with, especially since you can’t plock the key it quantizes to., so I pretty much stick to chromatic.
EDIT: it would also be nice to have the option of retaining step values when you mute them. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to quickly reset a step value by turning it off and then back on, but more often I’d like to be able to turn a step off and have it retain its value when I turned it back on - as it is, musing steps in the arp pattern isn’t that useful for real time performance. I guess the workaround would be to copy the arp pattern before you did your step mutes and then paste it to revert the mutes back.
But even with those caveats it’s still a great arpeggiator.
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I usually experiment with the OT arpeggiating the DN´s arp and sometimes is amazing. I´d like to have more scales, as well as more arp parameters, more of them p-lockable, and no hanging notes.
I’ve never had a hanging note with the arp before, are you sending a lot of other note and control data when it happens?
One thing I do to ‘mute’ a step is turn it into a conditional trig. Try making it ‘1st’ or ‘fill’ or something and then, when you want the step again, change it back.
Of course it’s a bit slow if you want to do lots of steps but maybe helpful.
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Man I think this kind of approach with the waldorf XTK would be lethal … super long release with all the logic operators working on wave position and then picking those back up and resampling them … mmmmmm
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I meant steps in the arpeggiator pattern, not in the sequencer. When you turn a step off in the arp pattern, it reverts to its default value when you turn it back on, so you can’t effectively improvise with stepo mutes inside the arpeggiator. If the step values were retained you could sit in the arp page and turn individual steps off and on to change your pattern up in real time. One of the things I like to do with the arp is treat it as my sequencer and treat the main sequencer track as more of a song mode for arranging different transpositions and other variations of the sequence that actually lives inside the arpeggiator. Being able to temporarily mute steps in the arp pattern instead of clearing them every time you swith them off wouldjust be one more nice tool to have.
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Maybe this happens when the trig lenght is set to INF, I use to do so to choose a 1/8 scale.
That´s an annoying thing in the OT´s arp for sure.
Definitely! OT’s arp triggering the Blofeld with it’s arp on is super cool.
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Here the same guy in that Midi ARP OT video also made this video ,“Why you SHOULDN’T buy and Octatrack”
I’m keeping mine even after seeing this video lol I have also been using midi Arp in OT since I got it , here is a better demonstration of a midi arp with a stronger synthesis: https://soundcloud.com/glooms/mega-synth-drivewip it’s OT sending midi arp to sega genesis on 4 FM channels 
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