cool, abergdahl!! way to think outside the box. OT is awesome!
your technique reminded me of something elektronaut neil baldwin has experimented with.
Here’s an inspiring track he made a couple of years ago with 2 seconds of noise, routing the output to different recorders that he would manually trig at random: https://soundcloud.com/neilbaldwin/eff-bee-bee
Here’s how Neil described making the track. it was for the famous OT science lab where OT owners committed to making a track using only 2 seconds of noise:
http://www.elektron-users.com/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=28&func=view&id=170583&catid=15&limit=10&limitstart=190
So, I started by assigning the noise sample to Track 1 in a flex machine and placing a couple of random triggers in a 16-step pattern.
I then went into Record Setup and set the source for Recorder 2 to be the output of Track 1. The source for Rec. 3 to the output of T2 and then the source for Rec. 4 to the output of T3.
Then I just placed a few random Rec Trigs in Track 2-4, some of them being one-shot as during the ‘performance’ (which is essentially what the track was) I would be able to re-arm certain Recorder steps. I also set the RLEN parameters different on each Recorder
There’s some filtering going on of course and I also had 4 Scenes setup which had the Amp Release for T1 set to 4 different lengths from very short to very long.
Once the Octatrack is playing, what’s happening is T1 plays the noises, T2 samples some bit of T1, T3 samples some bit of T2 and T4…well you get the idea.
Now, with all that setup, depending where you place the playback and recorder trigs you get a totally different collage of sounds. It’s strange though, as you make the tweaks, because there’s inter-track delay (as the tweak is fed down through the recorder cascade), you don’t hear the effect of your tweaks immediately. Some stuff worked, some stuff didn’t. The feeling of being slightly removed from the tweaking process is funnily at odds with the usual immediacy of tweaking on the Octatrack. And that’s only using 4 tracks
It gets even more complicated part way through as I then had the idea of p-locking some of the playback trigs on T1 to play from Recorders 2 to 4. Much of the ‘tonal’ textures you hear are because there’s an internal recorder feedback loop going on (it got a bit out of control about the 6:00 mark for a while in that harsh ringing section - I was trying to subtly wrestle it back under control without being too obvious)
It’s definitely something I’m going to explore more of. I really got the feeling I scratched the surface of something pretty interesting.
