Chords, owning no synth

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Hi guys,
I’ve been discovering this machine the last couple days, got the MK2.

I’m loving it, it doesn’t seem to be as dauntingly hard to learn as it was made out to be i feel, there are a lot of things to learn but they are not difficult per say ?

Anyway, i just realized that polyphony on one track is out the window, so my collection of synth one shots is basically doomed to stick to melodies.

I imagine it’s possible to just use three separate tracks and stack notes to form a chord and resample but it seems like a hassle and a creativity slower/killer to me.

Yes i could just find chords samples but that reduces the possibilities, i love my one shots and make synths out of them.
Also yes i could just record and sample chords from my laptop but i bought this machine to solve a deep issue of being depressed and losing all meaning to the music i make on computer. I uninstalled every plug and just kept ableton to cut samples IF needed but my computer is essentially meant to gather dust while i reconnect myself with an offline box.

Anyway my question is, do you have any creative workarounds to that? Until i buy a synth in november at least.
I know it seems silly because most people diverged to any of the solutions above already i imagine;

#2

OT has limitations. Either you accept or even embrace the workarounds and the peculiar workflow, and there is much fun to be found, or you’ll end frustrated.

Check this thread on how to generate chords quickly and use them as sample slices.

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#3

@Taro chord single cycle waveform chains for OT.

I use this, also have a bunch of long chord samples, stabs pads etc, or just sample my digitone. All methods yeild good results.

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#4

While I understand your feeling about using a computer and software, I would like to offer a point of view that may help you feel less upset about using a computer.

A computer is just a tool that offers the flexibility to use it as simple or complex as you need. Programming some chords with a synth on a DAW to sample is not a daunting task, it doesn’t take days to achieve, it doesn’t involve an immersive commitment to the computer or software, it’s not a life changing experience. It is simply a tool for a task.

While you could just buy a chord pack, if you know how to put chords together, it may be more inspiring and fruitful to make your own with your own sounds.

It’s like going to the supermarket to buy food. It may be annoying but the task can be done in under an hour, once a week or so, and you go in and get out, and it’s done.

Many things involve a bit of a sacrifice.

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#5

Here is Barker’s web page, with .ot sliced files and MIDI files to generate further chords with other synths.

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#6

Using octaslicer to make chains, and playing with a midi keyboard/launchpad with retrokits midi cable polymux

Can set aside whatever number of channels for your chords and play them polyphonicly

I did this for a while and by far the best for me anyway, can them record and save as to static - so not using the ram - and then move on

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#7

I just use a synth and sampler in addition to the OT if I want live polyphony. I feel you with wanting to get away from the computer but if you make a really cut down and focused DAW project that just has a synth or sampler + cheap MIDI keyboard that’s a good way to get something you can feed into the OT.

The simplest/quickest solution to getting a chord on the OT that I can think of would be to play notes chromatically and send them into a delay so that they stack up. Then either freeze that delay or do a quick resample into a track. I think that would be quite fun and be an interesting thing to try in a live performance even. I think I’ll give that a go a bit later actually.

You could also maybe try using an LFO with a custom wave shape to modulate the pitch or rate parameter so that when you press a trig it will automatically play a chord starting from the key you pressed.

#8

If you’re an iOS user, there’s a huge range of cheap/free apps that you could sequence or just clock from the Octa that might make life easier, some great threads in here on the topic. Idk about Android but doesn’t seem the audio system is as good for real-time stuff

#9

Since you’re a hardware guy; get a budget poly, like the new Roland Tweak synth - or something cheap second hand- and control it over MIDI. Perhaps the Dreadbox Nymphes? In my case, I believe that work-arounds would give me more frustrations than using the computer.

If you can live with using the Computer as an instrument, but keep the Octatrack in control :
I have a video on my youtube channel where I control the Ableton Drift synth, that I quite like from my Syntakt. This gives me polyphony and chords. Since the Elektron boxes have good Midi CC abilities. I can control parameters of the synth hands on from the Syntakt. Jam with #Elektron #Syntakt and the new #Ableton 11.3 Drift synth - YouTube

#10

There is a workaround : Use a midi processor. As Bome for example.
Take an OT midi track, make it go thru Bome.
Create a script to Translate notes to OT Comb filter CC values.
Each note has to play a new CC value on a new track and a new midi channel.
On OT use 4 audio tracks. Assign them each a midi channel. Give them each a comb filter.
You also Can have CC’s to control params of each tracks, as the other fx, all from the midi track.

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#11

Worth pointing out that this is technically true for any instrument, including a computer unless you’re a proper wiz with coding and controller design. I consider the OT to have more capabilities than limitations, and I think there’s still a lot left to discover with it.

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#12

Thanks for your comment today i decided to just take an hour recording all major, minors and 7th/Sus2/sus4 chords i could muster from arturia pigments. Got a good folder of these and at least i won’t have to go back to the laptop for it anytime soon. I used different presets and also a really basic one that would be good to apply octa magic on to create my own synth patch with those chords.

Small sacrifices as you say. cheers

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#13

Two of my shoddy tricks for mono synths

#1 - Use really long tail/infinite reverb and quickly strum the chord notes.
#2 - Just like old chiptunes, use arps in place of chords for harmonies.

If you have a local music store that does rentals, rent and sample a synth for a huge fraction of the cost of owning one. Works great for analogue drum machines and saves you $1000s of dollars.

But as a very longtime owner of Octatrack, If I’m honest man, if you want to build up a sample base 100% you need to be sampling via PC. The Octatrack effects are complete outdated garbage and are the most useful as performance effects rather than studio. For example, compressors, saturation, EQ, etc. As well sampling on that tiny lcd screen is just time consuming and unpleasant, it literally takes like 1 min to set up some chords or whatever on the computer.

The way I usually do it is to set up a custom set of chords on the computer specifically per song, and create a sample chain so I can easily grid slice and either live play or sequence harmonies.

If you are hell bent on 0 computer sampling. You will NEED! A high quality outboard pedal like Eventide H9, Strymon Bigsky for example. This will give you infinitely better onboard effects to the Octatrack. In particular it lacks quality reverbs. But not using the PC and wanting to do hardware only is gonna get real expensive real fast compared to 2097029765 free plugins on computer

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#14

There’s no such thing as an outdated effect.

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#15

As I said, OT FX have their place. They are quick, low resource effects for creative modulations on the OT. But considering even other products coming out at the time the OT was released… 2010. Something like the Virus TI blows it out of the water in terms of virtual effect quality.

OT Spring and Plate reverb sounds like garbage. Dark sounds just passable enough to not be noticeable during a live performance. Reverbs are very CPU/resource intensive which is why they suck on OT. Probably the only other decent effect is the distortion section. You get a bitrate reducer and one type of distortion…

For contrast the modern Overdrive and Reverb on boxes like Digitakt sounds so much cleaner and nice. I try to avoid using effects on the OT unless it’s specifically going to be used with trig locks or as part of a crossfader scene… some of them like filter actually degrade the quality of your sample due to the DSP processing.

All of that can just be avoided by using DAW plugins, for the compression, EQ, chorus, phaser and whatnot. Then once the sample is crisp, further manipulate on the Octa. Sounds much cleaner. If you’re rich just get Eventide H9 and PC not needed.

#16

It comes down to personal preference really, if you’re really after the super clean modern glossy sound of CPU heavy effects then yeah you might be disappointed. Personally I just don’t think it’s worth obsessing over, all the FX are distinctive and can be used and combined for musical effect. Old music made with basic FX still sounds good :man_shrugging: , no reason why you can’t make more good music with the same stuff, and many people do just that.

I generally rank interface and utility over ‘sound quality’ with instruments, I’d always rather have something that I find inspiring and enjoyable to use over something that is technically more high fidelity or advanced sound-wise. Plugins and fancy pedals are a bit of an expensive faff for me when I could use an onboard effect to achieve a quick musical result and move on with the composition. Workflow preference comes into it too I guess.

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#17

Yeah i’m not really looking for a sound, just my creativity.
It feels like exactly the same problem i had on my computer, chasing clean sounds, precise eqing, etc,etc…
The point is that it’s really hard for some people like me to create and not “polish”.

No, even worse, it’s really hard to create already. So anything extra is a barrier.
Yes the octa effects are nothing amazing, after being on laptop for so long it feels weird having to crank the chorus/flanger/phaser so much to make it pierce through a mix, they seem a bit weak and i have a hard time believing that the 127 width really fills the stereo field like most plugs do but it doesn’t matter…
The eqs do enough, the compressor is pretty gluey, i’ll apply effects when i start finishing tracks and exporting them.

I admit that i’ll miss sound designing/mangling with hundreds of hightech effects but oh well…

1 Like
#18

Related, I love this paragraph in this Burial interview -

Burial: When I listened to these old tapes, I took what these jungle MCs were telling me seriously. Rolling a tune out, I took it as a commandment about how to make a tune: roll it out, do it fast. I was into old hardcore, darkside, trying to do a properly dark record. Not this new, pumped up tech sound. I liked the old tunes, properly darkside like finding a body in a lift shaft: dank moody tunes, suburban tunes. I want to go back to that hardcore era of darkside someday, which would be rugged, film samples just pitched up and down with strings. It wasn’t just that pure monochrome thing, it was something else, it sounded like tearing through an empty building. But the thing is, I had this bunch of tunes for my 2nd album that were dark tunes, and I just scrapped them. I took ages on them. I was worrying, because after my first album I felt a bit of pressure to follow it up. I worked for hours on these tunes, and I was trying to learn these programmes. These tunes were darker, more technical, all the tunes sounded like some kind of weapon that was being taken apart and put back together again. But then I got sort of sick of them, because I spent so long on them, I was moody about other things. So I wanted to make a glowing record, I wanted to cheer myself up. Instead of doing those dark tunes that took ages and were really detailed, I wanted to make a record fast. Something warm, glowing, junglist and garagey. I was listening to these Guy Called Gerald tunes. I wanted to do vocals but I can’t get a proper singer like him. So I cut up acapellas and made different sentences, even if they didn’t make sense but they summed up what I was feeling. I love those Foul Play and Omni Trio tunes where it was just the girl next door singing, So I got a lot of those quite low-quality vocals and started to pitch them up and down. You can do it really fast. I sort of did the whole album in about two weeks. Most of it in the final week. When I made this a lot of things were wrong. It was nice to say, ‘fuck this’, I’m just going to make it well fast. So I’m quite defensive of it. When you’re making a tune and it’s really late… I heard this thing on EastEnders about burning the candle at both ends with a flamethrower, I was making tunes in the middle of the night, if I didn’t have the vocal to keep me awake, like singing a lullaby, trying to hypnotise myself so I didn’t fall asleep

That was Untrue, a properly great album that got a lot of critical acclaim and continues to sound amazing. The same thinking can be applied in other genres too I think.

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#19

Shimmer reverb says ‘hello!’

:stuck_out_tongue:

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#20

Really?
There’s an artist called Flume who’s blown up the past years on the mainstream electronic scene, he’s considered as someone who’s quite cutting edge and future. His last mixtape and album are filled with shimmery ear candies.
Since then i really feel a trend in new releases of other artists pushing this effect.
The point is that there’s only so much new laws we can break, it’s like you don’t reinvent the guitar you just customize it and make it more appealing in different ways but at the end it’s just a guitar. So many effects that could be considered as cheesy can sound dope in the right context and trend.
With the boom of lofi music i it’s hard to deny that that there’s no such thing as outdated, it’s just a matter of who does what. You can make good effects sound cheap and cheesy if you don’t have proper taste.