All very solid advise, I much appreciate it - I really do - and will take it to heart, except for the audience bit, they’ll enjoy my choice of costume or be damned.
As for patterns, I usually don’t manage to squeeze the equivalent of about one track into sixteen patterns. There’s a lot of transitions and small variations going on with the trigs, where I place them and what I do with them, that I just can’t do with scenes. And I really do love how a track can feel alive when there’s small variations with its structure all the way to the end.
These transitions are important to me, so I’m basically building it in a linear fashion now. Starting from Bank A and working myself track by track through the banks until I hit the end of the last bank (don’t think I will, but in theory, that’s a possibility). Within this structure, there’s certainly a number of safe patterns where I can dwell or return to if I brain freeze, but mostly my tracks are made up of custom variations of patterns that´cycles in a fairly linear fashion, with scenes to color certain parts of them and to assist in transitions.
I’ll never be that kind of musician that can quickly tweak and manipulate sounds live and make interesting things by just improvising with real time looping, slicing and so on. But I do think I’m a fairly good composer with some sense of pacing, so I’ll take that as my strength and do something with that.
If a musician should play to its instrument’s strength rather than get stuck about what it can’t do, the same should apply to the creative force behind it. I accept my limitations by endorsing my strengths. And if those strengths are in the end only appreciated by my kids, as they’re jumping around in the kitchen while I’m rehearsing, I still feel I’ve done something right.
(and some day, I’ll tell you all about that - Cooking with the Octatrack - I usually rehearse while I’m cooking dinner for the kids, since I figure if I make dinner, keep an eye on the little ones and perform on the Octatrack at the same time, I should be fine when I go live on stage)
it’s very easy to get carried away I’ve found in the past performing live with machines, I’ve not done it solely with the OT yet but that would be my fear for sure as it’s so easy to get lost in it while enjoying yourself.
