This not their fight and they don’t have that kind of leverage to change it as they might think. I don’t understand why they cripple their product out of stubbornness.
Do they really believe Roland will change all their products dating back into the 80s to adhere to their way? Or Korg, Novation?
If you manufacture a utility device like the OT that is designed as a swiss army knife through and through, why do you deliberately stop at such minor details out of agenda? That helps nobody. Also… new products also don’t use the “correct” message. So they make their own product incompatible for past AND future generations of technology to proove… what exactly? Maybe, just maybe, Elektron are to ones that doing it wrong.
PS: sorry for ranting. I lost it when I read that… smh
I think you’re exaggerating the situation. I think it’s just a simple misunderstanding on Elektron’s part of a small aspect of the MIDI specifications.
Probably already requested in some form, but would LOVE a button combination to set the play position back an amount of time, be it a bar/page/#of steps for working on a pattern without needing to let it play all the way through.
Not sure if this is a bug (or a feature?) that’s already been discussed but I just ran into it.
T1 used to be a Static Machine playing a kick drum. I changed it to Flex, assigned it to its own Flex Recording 1, recorded a new sample on to Flex Recording 1, laid down a new trig and it still played that same kick drum from before. It wasn’t until I cleared all the pages (playback, amp, etc.) that it actually decided to play my sample.
“Sound selection” isn’t what i would call a small aspect in MIDI. It’s the number one feature and the first thing you do on every new part. If it was a misunderstanding, okay, but then how many years does it take to clear it up? For this reason alone i am hesitant to recommend the Octatrack to any newcomers as a potential studio centerpiece. It simply is incompatible with most MIDI gear unfortunately and i don’t wanna be “that guy” who sold them that. And it could be easily fixed as there is room at the “midi note setup” screen for 3 more knobs.
If you don’t place trigs on concerned tracks, you can keep tails. The machine / fx changes are effective with the first trig of the new part, per track.
You can use a transition pattern for that purpose.
(not really a reply to @sezare56, but to @Castor’s feature request)
And when you need trigs (for example: when you want to continue to use the same machine settings) just use a different track with the same machine settings and leave the original track trig-free.
SEQUENCER->SILENCE TRACKS needs to be unchecked in the global settings for this to work, of course.
This feature would probably have to be for a completely new version of the Octatrack.
I really wish you could create continually changing material in patterns. For example, let’s say you have the lyrics of a verse and they’re sliced up into many parts so you can arrange them however you want over the verse. The music is going to repeat, say, 8 times for the section, but you want the lyrics to be different for each repetition and you want all the lyrics on one track. To do this on the Octatrack you have to copy the pattern 8 times and arrange the lyrics on each pattern. Another example would be recording a guitar solo or something over the section (which I know is possible, but the support for it is weak… you have to have enough memory for available for one). Or maybe you want to overdub a bunch of one-shot samples over the section without having to program them with conditional trigs and all that (which has another problem of not being able to stack trigs on one step when you want different trigs on the same step of 1:2 and 2:2, for example).
I think a good solution would be to have tracks that were longer than the pattern (by a certain multiple), and have an indicator on the screen that would show and allow you to play and browse through the repetitions of the pattern so you could play/record/edit different parts of the longer tracks. The point is that each repetition of the longer track would have its own trigs.
And while I’m here, it would also be awesome to be able to put a “pick-up” trig towards the end of a pattern that would mark the start of pick-up notes on a track. How this would work is when you change patterns to the pattern with a pick-up trig, the pick-up notes would start playing before the pattern changed. So if you put a pick-up trig on a track on the last beat of the last bar of the pattern and switched to that pattern, the last beat of that track of the pattern would play over the last beat of the same track of the currently playing pattern before switching to the next pattern (the one with the pick-up trig). This might sound complicated, but isn’t anything crazy, it’s a standard musical technique. Right now I have to create a copy of a pattern to do pick-up notes. Using copied patterns for slight variations sucks because if you want to make a change to the pattern, you have to go through and make the change to every single copy.
I think these features would be really useful for making more naturally flowing music.
Customizable user parameter pages would be a nice thing (on all Elektron machines). Nothing fancy, just 1-2 pages where you can put together whatever parameters you want to have on a single page.