I’ve been working really hard with the OT since I purchased it, that’s around 5 months ago. First thing I did was to let the OT in it’s box during 2 first weeks while I made lots of samplechains in ableton Live with Reaktor and some glitch / noise synthesis VSTs, prepping a good own-made kick and some claps and hi hats, and feeding all that stuff in the OT.
Then I used lots of my weekends and week nights to work on all the sequencing while learning how to use the OT for my project. Since day 1 my love for this machine keeps growing and I’m already in a passionate state since day 2!!! Got some little struggles here and there but nothing that I could solve with a quick tour on this forum, besides the bug I found that prevents from using scene-lockings on pickup machine tracks. But I don’t scene-lock the pickup track I’m using and that’s all, just use a bit more live movements for my transitions (transition trick with pickup machine with cue AND external input for the monotron).
But playing this machine is a total joy, best machine I ever had in more than 15 years toying around with hardware and software!
I now have a ready-to-play full live set just with the OT alone, and using just a little monotron to add some spice to help for transitions.
I learnt a HUGE LOT from all of you here at Elektronauts, and I’m glad to present you my fresh new collection of octa jams and live recordings
Fat and deviant glitchy progressive techno I guess… ah ah just tell me
Here is my last jam on the octatrack, still exploiting the same bank for now!
8 patterns full of goodies, I think I’ll do another sound design session to create another sound bank for the project’s 8 next banks, or I’ll end with tracks all sounding the same!
Thanks mate, I had to share the joy that is now mine everyday since I acquired the OT!!
I don’t have any gig planned for now, I went underground approx 2 years ago when my 2-guys ableton controllerism live project went down after 3 years with lots of gigs and I was too tired to directly switch to solo live sets, I needed a break. Then I listened to lots of music and decided to work harder on my sound sources, sound design, and find an easier way to compose and play live (tired of 64-tracks ableton live projects with dozens of USB controllers ah ah).
The OT really opened a new world to me, given the fact that I had really increased my sound designs and all was needed finally was a great sequencer/sampler combo like the OT
I’m now promoting myself a bit around, searching for a new name for this project and working on a bit of biography, graphical design, creating dedicated facebook and bandcamp pages…
I hope I’ll get some gigs soon, I now have a +2h live set ready to play!
You’ll find in the first post’s soundcloud player some new recordings,
2 extracts of the first gig I did with the OT, sadly the recording device has had some bugs and I could only save 2 extracts from the whole set.
3 new jams with new sound material, Octajams 10 to 12,
I’m pretty proud of the Jams N°11 & 12, 12 being my favorite for the originality of the composition, especially the first part of the song that reminds me a lot of Rob Clouth’s Islands of Glass incredible track, and I’m really proud even if I won’t listen to his track anymore by fear that my own would really sound ugly in comparison, ah ah!!!
while not getting stuck on the black friday madness, I spared some time with the octatrack and 2 new jams got recorded, more into techno territory this time!!
Octatrack is THE machine. I can’t wait to get a few gigs to test this stuff on the audience… but why is it so, that I got no gig when I actually HAVE a great live to play?? (Had some offers when just after the end of my duo project, but wasn’t ready for a solo gig… and now I’m ready, but no gig.) Damn. Ah ah, this doesn’t remove the joy from these hours with my beloved OT!!!
I now have to work on the production, these are only live jams, “extracts” from a long live set and I want to make some real tracks out of it…
and that’s where it is a tad bit more difficult than when I was working only within Ableton Live… My jams use a lot the Xfader of the octatrack to control several parameters at once on several tracks, and this is difficult to use in a stems-bouncing situation…
So far I’m trying to get used to the OT’s arranger, and it’s quite capable, but I miss the deep automation possibilities I had with ableton Live…
I’ll try to keep it 100% OT even for the final tracks production, it’s really interesting to keep it minimal, then not getting lost with busses and sub busses and EQs and compressors and duplicate audio tracks and lots of lots of endless tweaking as I’m used to do with Ableton…
I’m proud I would eventually get this live set fully operational, and from 2h30 of musical material I ripped it down to 1h30 approx., selecting what was the most fluid to play live, homogenic, and making new chunks out of interesting random OT creativeness…
I played this live set on June 25th 2017, by night, open air, in the yard of the school I used to be in 35 years ago when I was 4, ah ah!! What a fun time, as I was installed just in front of our own sound system (PA), and sound was huge!
I hope you’ll like it. I’m happy I now manage a bit better the transition trick, using a Korg monotron to spice things up on Track 8 that is also dedicated to record the EXT IN and CUED TRX with the transition trick.
I can’t stop loving this beast machine, be it mk1 or mk2 or whateva, this is huge <3
