During the last weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ‘optimal’ way to to use the OT for drumming with external drum pads (Akai Mpd32 in my case). Straight-forward method: 8 tracks with one sample each. Main obstacle is the OT’s lack of access to slice/slot trig modes via Midi.
I found a good workflow that is less straight-forward but more powerful than just 8 samples on 8 tracks, which might be interesting/useful for some of you:
Integrated drum pad/looper setup
Track 1: kick
Tracks 2-4: disentangled from sequencer, hold mode, 4/16 quantization, always cue’d --> “drum pad tracks”
Tracks 5-7: flex recorders, recording from cue, qrec 4/16
Track 8: flex recorder, recording from main, qrec 4/16, on some patterns always sampling (see build-up trick)
Part 1: 3 basic drum sounds assigned to the drum pad tracks (snare, tom, rim)
Part 2: clap, oh, ride
Part 3: male vocal, female vocal, cowbell or closed hihat
Part 4: bass, synth1, synth2
Part 1 assigned to patterns X1-4, 2 to X5-8, …, where X=bank.
Mute tracks 5-7. Play a sequence on the drum tracks, press record on one of the flex recorders to start sampling, unmute the recorder. Switch to a pattern where part 2 is active, play some hihats, press record, unmute. Modulate what’s going on via prepared slices on the recorders, cue both playing recorder tracks, resample to the third. Mute recorders 1-2 (tracks 5-6), unmute 3 (track 7, resampled version). Switch to the vocal part, record something, etc etc… Additionally, ‘good-sounding’ sequences can be programmed into tracks 2-4 (drum loops, top loops or slice-mangling sequences) for instant goodness when creativity makes a break or accurate playback is needed (16th hats).
–> you get a kit with kick + 12 samples per bank, not perfect but more than the usual 8 samples.
of course, you can still easily scroll through a lot more samples with a knob or lfo assigned to the start parameter on a sliced one-shot sounds sample chain, but with these many flex recorders, it can be done in a more controlled fashion where changes on the start parameter do only change what’s not yet been resampled.