You‘re not necessarily doing something wrong. Maybe you just don’t like it. It’s really highly subjective and we all make different stuff, have different goals.
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Yeah, this is such a subjective topic!
Have you checked out the filter setup (double-tap the FX button)? You can change the filter slope and a few other settings in there that could possibly get it sounding more like what you want. If none of that sounds good to you, maybe you simply don’t like the filter on the OT!
What are some examples of filters you like?
Did those have those z-plane filters? I never had the chance to use any E-Mu samplers, but most of what I heard seemed to have great sounding filters
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Z-plane is awesome but digital filter technology. The Emax and earlier E-MU’s had actual analog filters per voice, that sounded killer.
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i guess i can understand this if youre just filtering a sample without any context. but i remember hearing all the youtube demos and recognizing a pattern where every drum pattern that was made with an octatrack has this super nice silky sheen over everything and i notice it now when working with mine
its the perfect kind of compressed smooth sound that i love. i think the elektron digital filters are some of the most finely tuned ones i’ve ever heard. they sound almost organic somehow. and im convinced that the digitakt filter is what makes all of the cool digitakt jams you hear on youtube and instagram sound so tactile and rubbery and thick. it makes things pop somehow. like you’re punching through a trampoline made of jello. hard to describe the quality i hear in those, obviously
i think it makes things sound extra punchy and 3d. on both machines, snappy enveloped sounds with a lpf drawn way back and opened up with another slightly snappier envelope makes the transient sound so present and real. not sure what it is. like you can really make a kick sound like you put a pillow inside of a kick drum. octa and dt filters are different, but they both kind of do the same thing. i think they have a similar quality overall
also, both of them, i think the octa moreso, are incredible for pinging with ultra high resonance. they sound better than some analog filters (not all, of course) for percussion synthesis when pinged. very “buttery” or something
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Yeah OT filter sounds great and is very versatile, it can sound pretty analog too I think. The PEQ on OT can be pinged too, very nice for percussion stuff.
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I love pinging the eq. I have been doing that like crazy lately. And I just realized how fast the lfos can get (although not audio rate like the other boxes), especially with the custom lfos modulating the eq freq and gain with high q, gets so crazy
I love it
I think the chorus, phaser, flanger should be ping able too. Can’t recall ever doing it recently, but i modulate them all over the place
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Yeah, the way the OT filter can bring out harmonics is really nice. If you turn up the resonance and just sweep through the spectrum, you’ll notice it. You may not like it, though, but many seem to do.
“Silky sheen” is actually a good description. I had this loop from Plaits I sampled into my OT, yesterday and was amazed at what the filter was able to do. As I swept the filter it basically transformed the loop as the resonance hit overtones of individual notes from the loop.
If we only had keytracking…
I’ll try to record something later, have to check if the Plaits loop is a good demonstration without the rest of the mix present. If not, I’ll try to get something else going to demonstrate it.
There are some analog filters that are also famously good at singling out harmonics, but I’ve never encountered one which has this “silky sheen”.
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The Achilles heel of the original electribes. They all have either had that problem or just haven’t had it yet. Fortunately it’s a really easy fix it you can use a soldering iron (pretty low level soldering skills required). You just have to reflow the solder joints where the power jack meets the board.
You owe it to yourself to get that thing up and running, it’s such a great machine. If you can’t solder you can take it to anyone who can do it even a little bit.
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The original MPC live1 is great! Have had mine for 5plus years. Love that you can layer 4 filter or FX per sample and pad… plus there’s 4 slots for each track so that’s a lot of EQ, filter and that for tweaking… tons of effects to play with!
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Some great replies everyone, after watching a few vids i’m very impressed with the sp404 , filter and effects both sound spot on, I know it’s not the most flexible machine but I think it’s raw sound and the quality of the effects sound great
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For sure. Basically anything with feedback, be it filter/EQ resonance or the feedback on a phaser.
One thing that’s kind of cool about pinging the chorus or other feedback on the OT is that you can add a compressor after, turn up the ratio to the max and you basically get a safety limiter. I do this when using headphones and have the feedback all the way up.
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A soft sampler plus Infiltrator is quite awesome
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and freeze print to pad on top of all of that… Damn!
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E-MU Ultra with RFX-32 - no comparison available that I’ve used.
With RFX-32 it dramatically opens up the synthesis and FX possibilities - the vocoder and ring modulator are no joke!!! I love it lots and will not ever not use one - unless something deeper comes out, but that seems unlikely, as the hardware market is moving towards ease of use, strong intutiveness and plesant learning curve. Although once versed, and with well organised sample bank on it’s internal drive - the EMU way of doing things is very fast! It’s just not done in a modern way so it’d be a little shock to the system coming from AR/OT/DT etc (Which I did BTW)
The filters have than 128 values on it’s frequency parameter - so there is much more resolution to sweeps when using it’s internal LFO’s/Envelopes than most other digital filters (Newer Elektrons also have this ofc 
)
Blimey. Is this designed as a more advanced version of Effectrix/Glitch?
I never use those. But to get a impression here a nice overview:
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It way more flexible than it’s given credit for.
It does sacrifice some things for the sake of immediacy, but I just got a Maschine mk3, and the 404 just sounds better in my opinion.
A little warmer. But it’s so easy to work with once you accept it.
Even it’s step sequencer, which you cannot control the play head, but you can make smaller 4 bar patterns and string them together seamlessly. You make one, copy paste, variation, copy paste, string together.
So it’s always a resampling workflow. Always.
And you can make a pattern, arm it and control start stop via midi. So you can sequence another device while the 404 plays a pattern of samples.
Basically making it a multitrack recorder, since it waits for recording, and you can add that to the pattern as well.
I made an experiment where I sampled someone playing a synth, then added drums via Syntakt.
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I played around with some stuff, yesterday, just jamming and checking levels and thought this demonstrates that “silky sheen” of the OT filter nicely.
The Plaits loop, that I fade in after seven seconds has an OT filter with a bit of overdrive and a healthy dose of resonance. As I sweep the filter it kind of glazes everything with a “sheen” and when it hits overtones in the loop, it “locks on” to them and pronounces them in a very nice way imho.
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