I love you.
How do you use the OP-1? Stand alone, as a source for samples, a combo, lots of other things?
I use it free of the pc which i love as you can concentrate on making music.
I used to use it for everything if I wasn’t near a computer but since I just got the octatrack, I’ve been syncing it via the oplab and recording into the octatrack. I’m just scratching the surface of what I can do with this setup. Still trying to make sense of recorder trigs. Their behavior is unpredictable (at least in my experience so far but I’m sure it’s user error).
I struggled with recorder trigs in the beginning, but now they’re essential and one of the primary reasons I’m sticking with the Octatrack.
I took me awhile before I realized the recorder triggers ran a separate track from the playback trigs. I just didn’t get why the Octa kept recording at frequently unexpected times, and why the hell something overwrote my recorder buffers all the time and why some samples just seemed to be a second or so, despite me recording an entire four bar sequence.
But eventually, it all clicked and now I can improvise and record stuff on the go and have something up and running within minutes, thanks to the recorder trigs, if I’ve got ideas and am inspired.
I’d imagine that if you’re fluent with the OP-1, once you get the hang of record trigs, you’ve got something really cool going on.
That is exactly what keeps happening. Sometimes it will record exactly the way I expect and sometimes it will record for 1 second. Then I thought I lost a track but it was some parameter in the filter that I turned by accident while making scenes. The whole process can get out of control if you don’t keep track of what you’re doing. How did you finally understand recorder trigs?
Well, I did two things that made it click for me. I used (and use) the Octatrack mainly to sample my own stuff - loops, sequences and one shots from different sources. I don’t use much prepared and purchased samples.
So I had sessions where I just sat down and jammed with my gear and recorded whatever came out of it. And the two things that made me get it, was this:
First off, I used only one shot recorder trigs. I set the recording limit to 64 steps (for four bar loops, which I usually record). I set the starting point for the recording trig to the first step in the pattern and midi-synced the source (a synth, for example) to the Octatrack’s sequencer. So, when the sequencer started, the synth’s sequencer started and the Octatrack started recording. It stopped after one loop and that created a perfect take for me. If I didn’t like the result, I just tweaked something in the synth’s sequence and launched the recorder trig again, while the Octatrack still kept running.
Also, I always cleared my recorder trigs afterwards. They still stick with the track when you exit, so depending on how you’ve defined them, they keep recording in the background. This, I didn’t get and it confused me, when it kept recording over my old stuff, came up with things I didn’t even remember recording and stuff like that.
So, essentially:
I used one-shot recorder trigs.
I put the recorder trig at the first step of the pattern.
I defined the length by steps - 64 steps, most of the time.
I cleared my recorder trigs once I was done.
From there, I learned the idea of trigs and use them in other ways now, all kind of ways. But before I got the basics, I was like “What is the deal with this? Why don’t put an audio threshold trigger like normal people would do and be done with it?”
But now, those trigs are one of the reasons I won’t give up the Octatrack.