Thanks! Gonna get better at this, I swear!
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That was pretty damn good! I need to get a new jam going with Octatrack (maybe even tonight). I still have a lot to learn even when it comes to output gain staging. Like you implied though, just get stuff down to track the progress, right?
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That was my thinking! We’re all ‘friends’ here and a big part of this for me is to chart my progress 
EDIT- I tend to get ideas started in the OT and at some point bail out and throw stems into the DAW. So I’m grateful for this science lab that I got to try things I never have. Never used so many Parts and patterns before, just for subtle changes. A huge disadvantage to putting everything into a DAW separately is you can’t take advantage of Scenes as well, so I found that helpful.
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Great stuff!
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Thanks! It’s got a long way to go, but working under some of your suggested guidelines already has me trying new stuff, for that very grateful!
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i hear cats meowing in this.
cool track, yo
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I’m struggling a bit here… A couple of weeks ago I spent three afternoons cleaning, reorganizing, and rewiring my studio to make Octatrack MKII the brain of the setup.
Progress learning the device itself continues, but my predicament is more philosophical: I have no idea what kind of music I want to make!
I was a guitar player in bands for almost ten years (I like vintage psychedelia, Bowie, new wave/post-punk/goth/80s psych, more ambient/experimental stuff like Talk Talk or Sonic Youth) but I’ve always also liked techno and “electronic ambient” strains, again usually rooted in the same late 80s/early 90s time period. From Warp to more modern acid and minimal sounds. Naturally Elektron… felt natural…
The Octatrack MKII feels very caught in the middle… At odds with longer phrases, played in from my guitar or bass, slowly forming “a song” the way you would in a DAW…
… Yet for the rest of the hardware (other Elektrons, modular rig, assorted synths) it’s clearly ideal…
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Some in things in common with you, adding reggae / funk / dub. With OT, I’m always surprised where it goes. I don’t plan and let OT choose the weird kind of music it wants to make! Nothing I listen to, for sure! 
I hear you… the challenge I have, though, is that making music in a style I know well helps me know how far off I am. (“Is this done? Is this good enough? Too cheesy?”) Without that guide, I’m a bit adrift…
Your birthday is 303 day! Not much longer now, just need to get a spare hour to put it all together and upload, probably Monday, in the meantime here is a nice picture 
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OT can play a lot of styles, mine loops guitar and other instruments up to 1026 steps, 16x64 step pattern cycles. My music is a blend of everything I like from meditation music, folk, reggae, funk, rock, spacegrass, all electrified and mashed up, OT hasn’t given me a problem regarding style or genre. I have these loops running over shorter 64 step tracks and using track scale some tracks can be up to 512 steps using 1/8. So I have all manner of loops running from 64 to 1024 steps so it doesn’t feel locked into a repetitive loop.
My advice is just go for it whatever you do until you just own that that’s what you do. If you can’t own it just keep going for it until you can… Groove is in the heart…
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Meditationspacefunk is my jam
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So you like jam and cheddar. Very British.
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Right now I’m playin peanut butter jelly jams with the Peanut Butter Jelly Jam Band!
Allman brothers? I like the Almond Butter band.
You take Sesame Street, I’ll take Tahini Road!
Why not go vegan, Lettuce Turnip some Beats!
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I won’t let my French buddy down
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Since I rearranged my studio—in the room adjoining the bedroom—I now see the Octatrack MKII when I lie in bed in the morning, rather than the modular.
Invariably this leads to thinking about the instrument and forming a gameplan for my next session. Some of that spills out here (sorry lol, you’re my support group now suckers).
Question/problem: my favourite Elektron is the Analog Four. It was my first. I’m lightning fast on it and it highlights something I’m struggling with on Octatrack.
With the Octatrack I have several synths hooked up via MIDI, but nothing beats the immediacy of using the A4’s own voices for a mixture of melodic and rhythmic content. One kick, aux perc, bass, a pad. I can get the bones of the track without lifting my hands off of one single device.
With the Octatrack I have a massive “cold start problem” through the devices that are hooked up to it for sampling… It’s twice the work for half the output, if that makes sense…
Secondly, related to my thoughts about “songs” from yesterday: I now realize the A4’s arranger is superiour to the OT for sketching out songs. It’s much easier to visualize, say, a “chorus” when it is a horizontal row of four patterns than vertically descending… In fact, stubbing out a track by copying patterns and then setting them up as a chain is amazing for longer parts. I’ll set up a chain of “A9 A10 A11 A12” all as copies of A1 and come back to them later to develop.
How to improve at visualizing/stubbing out longer sections of a track on Octatrack…
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You can do this in the Octa… Just hold down A1, then A2, 3 and 4 and press play. Now it’s chaining them together.
I have no idea what the A4’s arranger mode is like, but the Octatrack’s is wonderful imo.
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I like the OT’s arranger, it’s more suited to the workflow of developing a smaller total number of patterns and making heavy use of scenes to create “the performance.”
The A4’s arranger consists of pattern chains not patterns themselves. Chains are wide rows that can visually contain several patterns horizontally playing in sequence, rather than a single pattern looping some number of times before moving downward. (Of course a chain on the A4 could contain a single pattern if you want.) It seems to make the arrangement tighter and easier to visualize. “Ah yes, A9 A10 A11 A12 is my chorus, I’ll just drop that in again.”
Each seems well-suited to its use case, but the A4 is seeming more “compositional” to me this morning…