Plug it in somewhere away from a desk if possible on a comfy sofa with a dog and a cup of coffee and your choice of vapours and just jam for hours and hours trying out all of the features and digging into every menu I did this for about a year and still only just got around to the fx track recently
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Today I went into a new phase with my a4 setup.
Sold all my stuff but the a4 mk2
Had a mixer in the living room
Bought a looper (rc500), mainly for my guitar
Loved looping
Changed my mixer for Playdifferently 1.4
Now added strymon bluesky & zen delay
Really nice to have 1 synth, 1 sequencer, and dj-style song transition using a looper feels very solid
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Wow I googled that playdifferently mixer! Seems like it’s got lots of creative options
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I’m going to play a gig in a week and wanted to play an impromptu set with the Octatrack and an iPad. Since I bought an A4 MK1 again, I tried to incorporate it into my setup and it sounds so good that I decided to take it to the gig. Whenever things go in a wrong or boring direction, I can turn the A4 on and use it as a drum machine. This bad boy just sits in the mix.
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And it can scream! A really interesting beast to tame, really.
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That’s what I’m going for. My goal is to make the A4 sound as dirty as possible.
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It’s a freaking great drum machine, can get seriously expressive and dirty
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Lot of people love the dirt, I love the warm sound, might be the same…
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Yeah cranking the overdrive on a warm sounding chord can be very rewarding
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It’s all about the Perf mode…
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I’ve just bought one for some techno but hope to use it for ambient stuff as well
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Oh thank you! I heavily used the A4 on three albums. It‘s an excellent ambient synth in my opinion.
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It can, definetly 
A beast for many different styles, from house to techno, but also for ambient, noise, or even industrial.
An amazing joy to program and incredible sounding machine.
Got a second hand MK2 + decksaver for a real nice price yesterday. I can already tell by my initial fiddling that this is going to usurp multiple instruments in the studio which is great (yay, consolidation). I got it primarily for drum duties and I love the vast possibilities. Bread and butter immediate instruments are cool for when you just need to get going quickfast, but I’ve found that I really like deep-diving into more open architectures. Modular in a box and all that. Same reason I also recently got a DSI Pro 2. I feel like those two will make a nice pair. Maybe too much actually 
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As far as I know, you can’t do direct jumps with program change messages. I set the PC clips’ quantization to ‘None’ but the A4 always switches patterns at the end of the current one (like when it’s set to sequential mode). Works perfectly for me, because I want to change patterns together with other clips so I didn’t try anything else – there might be some other trick but clip quantization doesn’t work.
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I have been very much enjoying this album over the past few months.
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Yeah that’s how I’m using mine too. It’s how it should be but sometimes playing with direct jumps can be fun as well
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I have a better learning curve to propose.
Rent an Octatrack mk2.
Be shocked and horrified.
Learn it as much as you can.
Then switch to the A4 and go, “oh my gosh this thing is easy”!
#badadvice
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Nice try, I already have the Octatrack MK2 about two weeks before. A4 MK2 just arrived hah!