:wq!
gn8!
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I like all the suggestions for sampling in this thread, but lately I’ve been doing it over MIDI from a different sequencer and/or Blokas Midihub. I often trigger SRC3 recording by sending note 63 (D#4 I think) to the track where I’m targeting recording. I think notes 62 and 61 are for the external inputs, but I usually do internal sampling.
I often use the Digitakt or Digitone for this method, so I can use conditional triggers… Basically this is just a big workaround for the fact that record trigs don’t support conditional triggers! It’s fun, especially when I have multiple concurrent streams of audio being sampled at different start times.
I like using QREC too, but it’s complicated to hit the buttons at the right time when using more than one or two buffers.
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I feel like the title of this thread should be “Sampling on OT isn’t that bad if you already own one and have been complaining about how complicated it is but not when compared to more straightforward samplers because OT is deep lol”
will that title fit?
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Yeah, it’s not that bad if you know exactly how to do it!
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It was more of an affirmation, like something you’d say in the mirror every day
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what was the SNL guys name? Stewart Smalley? remember him?
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Yeah, sampling takes more steps than on most samplers. One might say it’s complicated, but I wouldn’t want to trade the OT’s flexibility for ease of use.
I don’t know any other samplers that allow sampling 8 buffers simultaneously with different starting points and different lengths, without even stopping the sequencer. Are there others? Even in software I don’t really know anything that allows doing that. I would be interested in hearing about other tools actually, because this is the main thing I love about the OT.
Before having an OT I was cooking up something similar with multiple parallel recording buffers in Supercollider. It would have worked, but I don’t think it would have been nearly as fun to use.
I think the complexity is a small price to pay for what it’s capable of doing. Also, there are multiple ways of sampling, and I think it’s totally ok to choose a favorite and ignore the less appealing methods – or the methods that aren’t as compatible with one’s personal workflow
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how do you do different starting points but at the same time?
i’ve spent the afternoon trying and failing to record anything with mine…then this thread popped up again and feels like a direct attack on my intelligence 
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there’s room on that fence for two
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There are 8 recording buffers. Let’s say you start buffer 1 on step 1, buffer 2 on step 2, buffer 3 on step 3, and so on. If any of the recordings are longer than one step, they will overlap, and record concurrently. Since the buffers are independent, it’s not a problem if they overlap, in fact it’s really awesome and you can get creative with them.
They can also play back concurrently, if you’d like. I do this a lot. I tend to set up cascading resampling between several tracks on the OT
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Jokes aside, I switched from 96kHz down to 48 a few years ago because I did a (sort of) careful comparison of identical material recorded at both rates on my interface and found that
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the difference was pretty noticeable
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I like 48 better
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Sampling on the OT ain’t so bad.
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I like what this has devolved into in the last hour, I support this discussion.
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Would you have an audio example?
I see how to do that technically but struggle to see how musical it could be…
By defauft OT is ready to record inputs AB/CD : press Track + Rec 1 or 2
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I’m reluctant vim user, just learning the keystrokes I need and nothing more. And when not on the production server, I’m happy to ditch it for my Jetbrains IDE. But I still make fun of emacs users 
My take on the Octatrack is that it gives a bit of a Stockholm syndrom to it’s users, just like vim. To the point where these users start to claim that it’s “completely intuitive” when in fact it took them months to learn, years to master and is nothing intuitive.
You can record a sample into a buffer with a simple track + rec button press, or just a single press of a rec button if you’ve set it up for quick record. Multiple buffers can be recorded into simultaneously like this or using pattern trigs which can be figured out in like under 30 mins with some reading of the manual + experimentation. Same for the sample rec settings, there’s some unintuitive abbreviations but if you can read the manual and spend a short time seeing what they all do it’s just not difficult. If you record into a buffer that’s being used in a pattern that’s playing you’ll hear the results pretty much immediately, sampling on the OT is glorious for live stuff.
If you break the OT down and focus on one of its capabilities it’s honestly fairly straightforward most of the time, there are some idiosyncrasies to keep an eye out for that can trip you up though. The genuinely tricky bit about it is when you start trying to put many of its features to use at once, then the complexity of interactions you need to make with it blooms like a fractal. But that’s the beauty and power of it, and with great power and expressiveness comes great responsibility on the part of the user to practice and learn if they want to make the most of it.
If someone has really any basic computer skills and has used keyboard shortcuts in programs before they should have no problem being able to figure out the OT proficiently enough after a bit of practice. It’s still much less complex than trying to learn a typical DAW from scratch IMO. I think a big part of grokking it successfully is building out a mental map of how all the ‘modules’ are laid out and work together, I guess it can be different for different people but for me I find myself thinking about it spatially and creating a kind of map of the structure in my head.
Basically I think if you lack time, computer skills, patience or imagination then the Octatrack probably isn’t the ideal device for you.
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I’m irked by the premise of this thread. Sampling on the octatrack is fucking amazing.
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