man, the octatrack is really testing my love to elektron.
i´m on the latest OS, empty reset and shit and the pickupmachines still crap out on me.
track one and two hold pickup machines, that´s all.
track 1 and 2 loop fine but sooner or later (talking minutes) one of the two can´t be arsed to record again, for some reason the octatrack sets recordtriggers on those machines where there should be none at all.
i really don´t get it,
i learned to live with the fact, that there never will be a slice to transients, eventhough it was prominently advertised on the octatrack promosheets, ok … but the rest should really be working as expected, nothing worse then a looper which needs too much attention in a performance …
sorry for the rant, i love my machinedrum since 7 years and i´m using the octatrack since the initial release day, i also know that elektron instruments have their own mind sometimes, but the octatrack has too much of his own will sometimes …
no midi activity, i didn´t have a midi cable connected. evenwith the manual the pickup machines are really mysterious in usage i reloaded the song and it started working again.
it´s strange though, sometimes i can record with the pitch not on zero, sometimes i can´t, same goes for LFO, sometimes it records fine with LFO applied sometimes not.
i can always go back to normal trackrecorders, they work as expected but results are obviously completely different if you punch in and out on the fly and so on … not to mention the mysterious “tracks suddenly don´t play anymore” bug on normal tracks.
it´s not tht i don´t like the OT, but it´s not always reliable in a livesituation and that´s a bummer. aside that, i had various elektrons and loved them all to bits, the octatrack still doesn´t feel done to some extent but then again it´s the only boy that offers such possibilities and that sometimes leads to frustration, on my side anyway …
so i made some progress, contrary to the manula where it says:
Playback of recorded Pickup machine sa
mples works a bit differently. If a Pickup
machine is assigned to a track,
it will be hard-linked to both
the track recorder
and recorder
buffer of that track. No recor
der buffers thus need to be assigned for Pickup machines to
play back recorded samp
les.
well, that´s not the case and that´s where the problem was. if i assign a pickupmachine to a track that had flexmachine assigned to a sample before, it doesn´t play, i have then assign the track back to a flex machine, choose the correct flexrecorder adn then again assign a pickupmachine, then it works as expected.
that’s not my experience i can jump a flex track from having various buffer/sample playback assignments and go straight to a steady pickup machine from there without fiddling, seems ok
Do you get some kind of “Recorder memory full” type message? I’m guessing that is what happened. The Octatrack can be a bit rude about letting the user know.
Try changing the “Dynamic Recorders” setting from NO to YES. It’s in page 39 of the manual. For your convenience, the excerpt from the manual:
DYNAMIC RECORDERS offers two settings. • NO forces the track recorders to use only the track recorder memory, which by default is 16 seconds of sampling time per track recorder. It is possible to increase or decrease the available track recorder memory by using the RESERVE RECORDINGS and the RESERVE LENGTH settings. • YES makes it possible for track recorders to exceed the track recorder mem- ory and utilize any free Flex RAM memory.
Once in a while, I get a Dub Rec Aborted error in a slave pickup machine, but the master pickup machine has always been stable for me.
As with the starter of the post, I also made the experience that the pickup machines do have some bugs.
I have OT as centerpiece, as Midi Controller for some synths, (No Midi In on OT), and with some Audios going into OT for effects and live looping.
Live Looping works nice usually for a while, I use 2 Pickup Machines, with Overdub, stopping, new jam etc., all while the Seq. is running.
What happened a few times already (once also live!):
suddenly, after sampling a new Loop, it starts the new loop SOMEWHERE, and definitely NOT on a groovy sweet spot! Only way out: Stop Seq., Start Seq, and Voila - it works again. Really shit in a Live Situation - fortunately I had a Live Drummer on my side to keep things going …
the symbols that show in what mode you are (rec/play/stop/overdub) are NOT corresponding to the actual status. I mean, the little dots besides the P (for the machine) worked, but on the main display (you know, the O for Rec, the > for play etc.) didn´t change, so I had no Idea what the Pickup Machine was doing, the small dots are too small to ready on stage.
You think it´s a RAM problem?
Maybe I should go back to 16 Bit (currently 24)?
Dynamic Recorder to YES (currently on default, don´t have the OT here now to check if default is YES or NO)?
Any Ideas?
If the PIckup Machines are not reliable, I have to sell the OT, because as a Live Keyboard player, Looping was one big reason o buy it (besides Midi Seq. and Effects for external gear)
You could try track recorder sampling with Flex machine instead . Anders Bergdahl (abergdahl) was using track recorders/flex machines to loop before pickup machines were added to the OS.
Disadvantages:
A little more configuration needed (need to assign recorder to track while pickup machine automatically assigns track recorder to track, need to go into grid recording mode and add a sample trig).
Pickup machine begins playback with one button press. If you forgot to add your trig, you have to take the extra step to hear playback.
Advantages:
By all reports, more stable than pickup machine
You can p-lock and do all the other wonderful things that Flex machines let you do.
You probably want to start with the manual sampling method - this is the one where you hold down a track button and Record AB (or CD if the instrument you’re sampling is connected to C and/or D), then have a sample trig play it back. The recorder trig sampling method is still a mystery to me, as the Elektron tutorial vid on that topic is hopelessly out of date (several people commenting on Youtube that they get no audio output following the tutorial steps - means the sequence of steps they are teaching in that vid is no longer valid).
I tried that before, but there´s one big disadvantage: while recording it´s MUCH louder, because it plays back at the same time, so together with the thru machine, I have 2 signals playing the same -> louder and different sound.
All I want is to have a synth routed thru the OT with some effects (delay/rev) and whenever I like what I play, record it in realtime- And all that in a live situation with no worries. Looks like this is not easily possible with the OT, strange …
(I know, I can also have a flex machine, rec trig and play trig on the 1, so sampling&playing back all the time, and whenever i like it, disarm the rec trig - but then again, I can´t play the synth anymore after I recorded something, no layering possible …)
You might have to play with the VOL setting on the AMP MAIN page. I noticed a similar thing when I first started using pickup machines - the original signal was always louder than the (previously recorded) looping samples. I complained about that and fellow OTers kindly pointed me to the AMP page. And of course play with the GAIN parameter on the Pickup Main page.
Have you tried the Dynamic Recorder setting that I mentioned earlier in the thread? That seemed to have cut down on the number of unexpected errors for me.
Another thing that Anders seems to do quite a bit that I haven’t tried yet is to set the RLEN parameter to something lower than MAX. He seems to set it to 32 a lot. It’s yet another way of controlling how much Flex RAM memory you use for looping - avoiding hitting that max memory limit seems to be key in ensuring stable looping behavior.
i reloaded the song and it started working again.