Hey Mike,
Not really sure how I’d make a video, I don’t think one on my phone would suffice. Well at this moment I’m not sure if it has to do with my gain staging or if its the sound of the machine itself. Samples from my computer have sounded pretty good, so I haven’t had much issues there at all! What I’m about to try is sampling my synths into my daw and then transferring them via usb to the octatrack. I’m hoping that will sound better! Will let you guys know how it goes
If you have to go through all that I wouldn’t want to keep the OT…
Maybe try the opposite, does anyone know of any good videos where the artists is sampling things and it sounds fine?
Then at least we could agree it’s capable of sounding good…
So key things to check;
Anything else?
Here’s dataline sampling things… I realize this has gone through youtube, but what do you think of the sound?
Cuckoo has a few videos where he’s direct sampling various equipment.
OP can’t post anymore today because he’s a new user, he was on 16 bit recording and gonna check out 24…
Here’s what I pm’d him, we’ll hear from him tomorrow I guess…
I was gonna stay out of your topic just because I’ve talked about this a lot…
I do use an OT mk1 for live looping sampling, in my opinion I have really good ears and can notice a difference between my apogee enemble at 96000 and the OT, but the difference is super subtle and most of my friends can’t notice it…
Once I did a/b tests of the remastered dark side of the moon from apogee and through OT mixer dir, difference was super subtle, the material still sounded epic through the OT as it should…
Here’s my gain tips for sampling on a mk1, not sure if it’s exactly the same for mk2 and currently I’m adjusting it a little, but it has given me good results in the past:
Hope you get to where you like it, I guarantee you there’s tons of artists using it and we would not if we thought our tone was destroyed… But if your not happy I always say go with your gut, don’t let us try to make you keep it if you really just wanna sell the thing…
Good luck!
I’m waiting on my MKII to arrive in 10 days or so. I’m planning on doing a lot of tests with gain staging on the new inputs. I have a wide array of sources I’m sampling from (turntable, modular, iPad, etc.) so getting it consistent without having to prerecord through my DAW is the end goal.
I only have two samples on my OT and I barely ever trigger them, everything I do with it is live capture…
On the flip side everything I do with the OT also vanishes when I turn it off…
It’s transitory, like a sonic mandala… 
I felt the same way and bought easier to use gear, still pretty good stuff. Since getting OT2 I realize I was buying around what I really wanted. Yes it’s less immediate but not by that much and you can really see a long term path with the machine, which may even save time and money over time.
Thing is, the TB-03 sounds amazing in that video, but it turns out it’s mostly down to the Analog Drive it’s going through and the Heat on the master. Though the OT does contribute in a positive way, to be fair.
Right, I don’t watch many performance videos so it was just the easiest thing for me to reference…
We’ll hear from OP tomorrow, but he did tell me results were much better using 24bit setting…
No, I get you, for sure, my reaction immediately was “hey that sounds good”. And the OT definitely enables it. The Heat/Drive aren’t fixing or hiding anything.
There’s a recent video where Cuckoo samples live/acoustic drum samples from a keyboard, and they sound great – very present and clean-sounding, it sounds like a live kit. You could probably ask him (here) about his process as well… he’s super friendly, helpful etc.
Hey guys, I couldn’t post for a couple hours, but I’m back now!
So I did a little A/B test with material I recorded into my DAW and transferred to the OT. I turned off time stretching and found that the sounds were very close. I do think that the OT is compressing the audio a bit, but thats to be expected with any hardware right? Anyways its pretty tough to tell a difference between the 2 unless you start really mucking around with the FX on the OT. I’m alot happier with these results and I think you could probably get similar results by recording stuff in, if everything is 24 bit and the gain staging is done properly.
Im getting used to the OT workflow and I’m thinking I’m going to stick with it. It would really suck missing all the good stuff if I ended up switching to the DT. It would be so amazing if the OT Mk2 had updated effects like the DT, and I’m wondering if that could ever happen in an OS update?
Thanks for all the help guys. If anyone is running into the same issues with the OT Mk2, my advice is to go to the Control Memory settings page and change Flex Format and Recorder Format to 24 Bit. When you import samples make sure that time stretch is off.
As for the muting issue, the best work arounds I’ve found is to bring things in and out using patterns and the scenes. The scenes allow for more interesting transitions then cutting volume anyways.
good to hear, only just bought an OT mk2 
Some great info here.
My only advice would be to get something to “colour” 
your synths before the Ot’s inputs, like a compressor 
then you also can get a nice hot input level.
Glad things worked out so far.
Ironically, engaging in this post prompted me to recheck my Control Mem settings ,… which I thought I had reset once upon a time.
Alas, Flex and Rec bit rates were back to 16bit 
… this is why it becomes very noticeable to me when recording acoustic instruments ( guitar , bass, upright bass)
Lesson , these might reset to default if you start a whole new SET . So check these periodically if beginning a whole new SET ( eg, for sampling instruments ) .
However, there might be some RAM limitations ( particularly with FLEX machines ) when using 24 bit .
Hello.
For me, I shifted to 24-bit after sampling the Continuum fingerboard in 16-bit. The Continuum is super high resolution and with complex overtones that I felt took a hit in 16-bit. It sounds noticeably better in 24-bit for me. So much better actually that I suspect there might even be something subtly wrong in the AD conversion in 16-bit. I’ve described this and reported it to the Elektron feedback form. If many of you are having the same issue with 16-bit sampling I’d urge each and every one of you to report it to a Elektron so that they get an impression of how wide spread this is.