agree the marketing from Elektron is less than larger companies like Roland and Korg. I discovered Elektron gear by pure accident meeting people at synth meetups years ago with Elektron machines. After tine using a friend’s MachineDrum, I wanted one and my friend who has a ton of modular recommended the A4 as first Elektron.
I think people not making EDM will relate to the OP. We are probably 0,5% on this forum though 
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I get it, OP. I’m not skilled enough to make jazz, but I use my Elektron samplers to make glitchy folktronica with guitars and keys. It’s not a market that they advertise to (lol is anyone trying to cater to that niche), so it took a while for me to realize that I could use these tools to chase that sound I was after.
The main thrust of the marketing is the techno thing, but there are breadcrumbs (especially from the Cenk days) that show the world of potential. As much as I think Ricky Tinez is a cool guy, I hope they add another demo person who can show the side of the machines that isn’t house and IDM. There’s plenty of cool people on these boards making interesting music that way (happy to dig some up 
)
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This is a really good point.
It has been over a decade since OT has been on the market and way…WAY more people are newly exploring what technology can do for music making in all genres. Social media algos reward new content and Octatrack could easily have a refresh in the limelight.
If Elektron retail partners were smart, they’d lurk this board, find posts like these, and actually make some vids which introduce the product to new customer groups - but that entails them knowing their customers and having the means to make videos…which they kinda should.
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the jazzy thing on Elektron machines, in particular the OT, is that you can define where SWING is applied and where not and how much. Plus retrigger off-grid up to 8.0 steps, plus microtime probability and conditionals, plus 3 LFO per track which can rely on 8 LFO designers and influence each other, plus all mangled in nicely twisted scenes that fade to each others or to the tracks params. Pretty unique.
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Still, the 16 step layout feels super cumbersome for non 4/4 music…
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My entire (amateur) musical career seems to have been ‘That’s an interesting instrument, I wonder if I can make the things I like with it’. This means I will cover a lot of ground researching outside the niche I create in. To op point though not everyone will do this and there’s likely a large addressable market that has no idea Elektron even exist or that their machines can be whatever you want them to. The marketing team have to pick their target market though as they don’t have infinite resources. For everything else there’s this forum/internet and the hope that supposedly creative people can apply the demonstrated concepts to varying contexts.
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While I think others have said it in some ways, I think for everyone it really does come down to your introduction to concepts that with the octatrack is all together foreign to most people.
Elektron aptly titled the instrument as an 8-track ‘Dynamic’ ‘Performance’ Sampler.
Keep the two word’s in mind.
It’s a sampler. The sampler has been around for decades. However synthesizers were around for decades before Robert Moog came along. Obscure, and not recognized in the larger musical community at the time.
And though with the MPC and J Dilla, the Sampler became more widely recognized as an ‘Instrument’ in the popular culture side of the music community at that time it still wasn’t something common like a guitar or a piano.
The Octatrack wasn’t marketed to the wider musical community when it was released, so far as demo’s are regarded. However it was marketed by Elektron as a ‘Machine’ that ‘Makes Music’ as their main release advert states.
Before that was the Mono-‘Machine’ & the ‘Machine’-Drum.
Just like the synthesizer in it’s tipping point going from an obscure set of modules used primarily in the scientific community in labs for audio research to it’s reception into the wider musical community with Wendy Carlos’s ‘Switched On Bach’ and soon after the other more popular music groups incorporating the Moog Modular System into their music.
So I would say the Sampler, in and of it self is still in some sense, though widely used and accepted in it’s general sense, with the Octatrack really in my opinion it is a combination of the instrumental ‘Dynamic-Performance’ and the ‘Machine’- as you would likely agree from your use of it the time it takes to come to understand how to ‘program’ it’s modular-esque feature set & nature to your performance approach.
And it certainly lends it self to the improvisational model of approach that is what jazz is about. But clearly in the wider jazz community it’s not perhaps as widely understood/accepted or used. For now.
But with the wide spread of the internet, it’s quite synonymous with the ever popular
OP-1, but again it’s still misunderstood because the technical side of it isn’t something people are all educated about.
I’m sure someone who comes from a traditional musical background playing piano, saxophone, or other traditional acoustic instruments has little to no knowledge of an LFO or parameter locking, or a trig-condition.
Those terms get more into synthesis and sequencing, and into exclusive features that were once mainly just introduced from Elektron themselves in a hardware instrument. Perhaps not entirely new concepts in software, or some other obscure instrument or device. So, it really has like the Microkorg come a long way and is still thriving in production, and more and more people know ‘of it’, but still fewer understand and are fully in the ‘know’ of what it brings to the table.
So, I believe from my experience with it that it brings a ‘Dynamic’ to elektronik instruments that is still not quite rivaled, but is becoming more recognized as it’s become more widely known.
Perhaps you will create & shed light from your shared musical expressions that will further that understanding to the larger jazz community, though maybe not today, but perhaps as those who find your music or see your performances witness your realization of your creative, musical imagination expressed through the Octatrack.
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The fact that Elektron boxes may be geared and sold as beat-based music machines doesn’t stop anyone from using them differently.
As a casual anecdote, the few minutes I spent years ago with Digitakt I used it as a drone machine and not for percussive duties.
Likewise, many people use the A4 as a drum machine and not only as 4 monosynths or 4-voice poly. YMMV.
We are a bit lazy in this day and age of YouTube, getting used to getting use-cases spoon-fed 
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What jazz would you expect to be there when the country is under communist lid since Soviet and USA “liberated” the country in 1945… We got rid of soviets in 89…the whole time the country was under blanket… And jazz, was American… You are not allowed anything “Amerika” under soviet lid…
Similar as today with ppl of Russia, the know what they are allowed to know, cut from the rest of the world…
He states that he’s sad he didn’t buy the instrument earlier because of how it was presented by Elektron. So clearly my points are valid. I read the manual twice before I bought my first octatrack 7 years ago. To see if it would help me realize things I wanted to see realized. A TR-909 clone would not get me there even though they both look sort of similar. Octatrack: sampler and sequencer. “Okay so what can it do?”
But anyways, the Elektron’s marketing department is not to blame for OP missing out on the these machines. That would be silly. If you want a red Volvo, and on the Volvo ad the colour is blue, you’re not buying an Italian Fiat or Alfa Romeo.
I don’t necessarily think there is a problem as such, but if there is, then it lies with Elektron and how they market their product. I’ve known very good musicians that don’t really ‘invest’ in gear in the way you would expect from the ‘general’ electronic musicians view point, so I totally understand the opinion that unless something is on your radar then you may not understand it’s use case or potential. Considering Elektron market the OT as a device of unlimited potential they don’t really do a job of marketing it outside of the expected electronic angles, and you could argue that they probably don’t need to (or want to). I think they are missing a trick though, and could approach it more like Ableton do with Push/Live - be more universal and educational on their channels, especially when there has never been a time in history when it has been as easy to do so.
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What’s the % of jazz musicians interested in “live electronics” ?
There you have the answer.
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Even though Cenk was more of a techno head than Ricky, I discovered the potential of an OT applied to other techniques more with him than with Ricky. This change of face is more like hiring a Youtuber known to a broader community than hiring someone for his musician skills IMO.
I just think it comes down to 2 worlds still largely ignoring each other: instrumental musicians VS electronic people.
It’s a bit weird to state this but as surprising as it seems (we are soon in 2024 and electronic music gear has been on the market for quite long now) I don’t see so many artists mixing both world with success.
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Could you point me to a description of this please? Sounds amazing.
After 13 years, I’ve still not grasped much of what the OT can do. I mostly use it as a drum machine or for backing tracks. Still my favorite Elektron device.
It’s an interesting take for sure. But I think Elektron doubling down on the people most likely to use their instruments makes the most sense for them. I think it would be pretty hard to get non-electronic musicians interested in an OT through marketing of their own. Best bet is that some musicians looking for a new approach with new gear will discover it and spread the word. But I assume a concentrated effort to reach out to such musicians in the hope of them digging into OT and recommending it would be way too much work and money for maybe a few people responding.
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Elektron should blame themselfs if the marketing strategy isnt optimal.
You should blame yourself for not doing the research.
In almost all situations in life blaming another person is the least favourable thing to do.
Good for you mate, I don’t really read manuals of equipment I don’t own. Actually now when I think about it, I rarely read them for equipment I own.
You are taking this topic way too close to your heart. I am not blaming anyone for anything. I just thought it was worth noting that OT for non-electronic musician is as helpful and potent and for electronic musician - actually maybe more, as EDM musicians have vast number of samplers that they can use to achieve similar results, while I didn’t found anything as closely good for my use as OT, even though it’s not advertised specifically for “my community” of musicians.
0%. Thats the point I’m making. This isn’t just “live electronics”.
OT is what Miles Davis would kill to have. If you read his biography/watch documentaries, you can see that not only him, but a lot of jazz musicians starting in the 70s made their own overdub machines with tape track records and trying to utilize it as what you can do with record buffers and flex tracks on OT in 5 mins.
I just want to add that this wasn’t aimed as somehow of bash of Elektron or their marketing strategy, more a peculiar observation and if anyone from Elektron team reads this stuff I’m just advising that for another similar instrument release they consider taking a bit more diverse spectre of musicians to showcase it, it could help them penetrate a big market, rather then taking 3 artists showcasing tape delay effect.
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this was exactly my point.
I would just correct its not “experimental” jazz musicians, but basically all musicians that play keys. Stack OT on top of your Nord/Rhodes/Wurli you are in dreamland.
I wouldn’t even post this if I thought this addresses the needs of some niche group of musicians. I’m talking about a huge market of musicians and capturing small % of that could triple their sales.
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The OT isn’t an easy device though, and respectfully most people who have one can’t even use the fucking thing, and that’s in a straight up electronic context! 
I think there’s a difference in being lazy, and not knowing that you need something for a certain workflow. I think that’s the magic in the OT. It’s a box that you can’t really explain in linear terms, so I do feel that if Elektron did market it more transparently, with more educational focus in different real world use cases, then it would have a wider reach in genres that you may not expect.
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