Composing over long audio file on Octatrack

Elektron Gear Octatrack
1

Hello everyone!

I’ve recently gotten my hands on an Octatrack Mk2 and I couldn’t be happier. However, as I’m new to the machine I would like to ask for some advice.

Long story short, a local choir has recorded a piece (a geographical fugue) for me to compose electronic music over. It’s just vocals, albeit really complex rhythmically.

So my first question would be: what’s the best way to approach this? I would be using the Octatrack with a monosynth that should arrive within the upcoming few days. Should I slice the piece into different slices on a static machine track? Should I somehow just let it play throughout the whole composition with a single trig? (If that’s possible?)

Please let me know how I could approach this challenge. Have a great day everyone!

2

This works

Yes it is possible with trig condition 1st, or a one shot trig.

I’d try both out and see what works better.

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Setting it up with a single trig may not be ideal, though, because if you started playing anywhere but the first trig location you wouldn’t hear the recording, right? That is, it wouldn’t “pick it up” in the middle?

4

So slicing it is the better option from what I understand? How should i go about it? Also, how do I lay down 2.5 minutes worth of trigs when there’s only 64 steps? I’m very much new to this so pardon me if I’m missing something. Thank you for the replies!

5

I‘d definitely spread the slices into some patterns, as discussed in a DJing thread I opened some months ago.

You can then prepare your synth stuff along these patterns.

Maybe use one pattern per fugue section, or even one for each 1-16 bars, as you like.

Scale settings per track are your friend. You can let your stuff use shorter loops than the slices it plays along with.

Whether you use song mode or not is your choice, you can also prepare a song storyline and switch it off for spontanuous jams leaving the prepared grid.

I‘d preferably stay in one bank (same part), but you‘re also free to use several banks, depending on the amount of sections you cut the fugue into.

Have fun, sounds interesting.

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Could you elaborate on this part? Like I said, I’m very new to the Octa so I’m not sure what I should do exactly.

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Was that choir recorded with a metronom/click ?
if not, recording “over” that material could be very
challenging with the OT, not only for a beginner.
I´d try to find some tempo first and experiment with slices.

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8

Yes, the choir was recorded to a click at 120bpm. The recording is, of course, not 100% accurate in terms of tempo due to human error, but it’s accurate enough to work with from what I’ve heard.

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Push [FUNC] + [PTN] to open the pattern settings menu. Top section is “SCALE MODE”. Set that to “PER TRACK”. Now push [FUNC] + [PAGE] to open the scale menu where you can set the length of each track individually. Would be helpful in this case where your choir samples are very long so that track could use a much longer pattern length. Also you can set “scale” to 1/8x for a very long pattern.

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I’ll try that in a bit! Thanks for the tip!

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11

So then it should be easy.
Slice the recording manually, put a slice on the beginning of each segment, and try to put them in seperate patterns with fitting scale parameters

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12

Tip if needed you can apply a slice grid on a particular portion, previously set with TRIM.
(if you want to skip intro / end).

To add slices, you have to be in a slice-free area. You can reduce one slice length temporarily if you don’t have free space.

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I only have time for a rushed answer here but one tip is to do the slicing thing so you can work in sections. You should get it to flow as one piece across (hopefully) one bank of patterns with careful use of divided tempo and maybe the arranger. If you notice tiny flaws going from one slice to the other don’t worry because you can always go back to ‘trig once’ for the final recording/performance of the whole piece.

My experience has been with recordings in the sub 3 minutes range…

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Oh and good luck it sounds cool

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I’d chop it up into manageable sections before importing to OT, then use slices on each section, load these into static slots, you have 128 to play with, each which can have 64 slices.

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You could then use scenes to parameter-lock the slice number and toggle the active scene, which in combination with use of scale length would give you the equivalent of “markers” to practice over 16 different sections of the choir…

17

Everyone will approach this differently. And it totally depends on what you want the end result to be.

I would probably use plays free mode for the long choir sample. Quantise the playback so everything stays in time. Timestretch off. Maybe have some FX and a neighbour machine and scenes on the cross fader to play with.

Then I might have some other tracks set up to grab bits of of the long sample and resample those into weird shapes, maybe rhythmic patterns. I wouldn’t worry about tempo drift between tracks. A bit of drift never killed anyone.

Then use the mono synth for whatever you want that to do, maybe make use of the OT midi arp? Or just noodle live?

Those are just my ideas.

18

Hello everyone!

Thank you very much for the replies! I’m afraid, however, that I haven’t had any luck setting things up right yet. Either I’m just super slow, which I probably am, or I’m doing something wrong. Would anyone be willing to give me an explanation over zoom or other similar platform? I would really appreciate it!