Zero to Hero - Octatrack Live Set paper challenge

So your friend just got accepted to present a showcase of her artwork at a swanky gallery. They’ve told her “she can provide music on the night” and she’s heard some of your stuff and thinks it’s a good opportunity for you both to do something complimentary and provide ambience.

What would you do?

You have an Octatrack with zero patterns and a card full of choice samples. It’s a 4 hour set and you have 7 days to prepare.

You can use the Octatrack in any configuration of course and the gallery has a basic sound system “you can plug into our mixer”.

How would you go about this?

Sample choice/prep
Octa config
Overall structure of the set
Pattern/loop creation
Other hardware / live sampling
Gain staging considerations
Practice

Remember - it’s not a club night, your providing ambience for 4 hours so a steady flow is more important than tight transitions and other tricks. You could even prep a 1 hour set and repeat 4 times as no one hangs about at these things all night, they come for the free drinks and a chat then move on.

Love to hear how our community would approach this in a variety of Octa configurations e.g. streaming longish samples, DJ style, live pattern flipping, etc.

4 hour set from scratch in 7 days.

With poly-rhythms, conditionals and arranger- you could let it get really generative and just step away and talk to whoever you think is cute

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I like it, 4 hours is a long time to just sit there pressing play - can you expand a bit ? Talk me through in a bit more detail - I’ve kinda avoided polyrhythms on the Octa cos every post I see has complicated math tables - but trig conditions seems an easier route to variety.

IMO, @CarlMikaelBjork 's videos are the best source of inspiration for those things. It basically just keeps varied- like you can figure out the math if you really want to. Mostly I just imagine if a track gets set to 15/16, then it’s constantly shifting forward a seq step. 17/16- it’s moving back a seq step. pretty simple and unimpressive when it’s just one poly-track. But once you have multiple tracks shifting in various directions, and then throw some conditional tracks and you’re in bliss

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