Merlin guide? Have you links about it?
You might say to yourself: āWhy on Godās given Green Earth should I need to use a guide written by a random forum user in order to better understand a piece of electronic music equipment?ā
and you might be rightā¦but that doesnāt make it unhelpful 
to some the esotericism is enticing
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The Way of Zen, perhaps?
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100% right. Alan Watts / The Way of Zen.
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Octatrack canāt be a mistake, as long as it doesnāt smoke.
Some humans can be a mistake.
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1.5 years to start to understand. Thatās what it has taken me. Which is about on par with playing an acoustic instrument like guitar. You have to play until your fingers bleed 
Itās like I was sitting in this room, looking around at all the pretty plants, admiring the walls. Then I stood up, and realized there was a wormhole to another dimension under my chair the entire time. A f$&king supermassive black hole right underneath me. Donāt give up before the miracle happens!
It was a combination of re-reading Merlins guide and posts on gain staging. You need enough track volume to trigger the effects. The magic happens at the level of the scenes, not the patterns. Scene locks take priority over parameter locksā¦
āMy God, itās full of stars!ā
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ā¦i guess, we can all agree on thisā¦at least half of all ot users got lost in the manual and finally to managed to wrap their heads around this thing after merlins take on itā¦
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Thank again for the huge amount of feed back support and encouragement.
Ive had a bit more time the pasts week and am starting to get the hang of the basic functions which is starting to look promising.
The break through for me was the Thadius Beck tutorials. 5 free a day on there which was the perfect pace to get the basics down.
There are still a few complaints I have and im sure there will be more, but IVE ALREADY BEGUN To find work arounds.
So OK - Ive Learned how to use as a mixer properly. As many of you know, the āmixā mixer page is not actually how to use the OT as a mixer. Thru tracks are the way to go.
Ive also got a better handle on the effects. I had all of the inputs going direct out through the āmixā so effects on the thru were getting washed out. I still think the effects are finnicky and wish the filter had visuals like the DT and DN. seems like elektron could have put a little more time into developing the Mk2 ui. but whatever. and imo the reverb is too digital for my taste. But overall I take back my assessment of the effects - Im getting really phenomenal tone out of it across the board - so am happy there.
Ive figured out using pickup machines for live looping - I wish there was a quick pickup machine set up. Like the ability to change the default pickup machine settings so I can add them quickly on the fly. I guess its about muscle memory and can get where i can set it up quickly, but in a live set would be nice to just switch a track to P and go without all the record settings. maybe this can be done. Also a big one I havent figured out yet is how to get the loops to change with a pattern change. The best Ive found on my own so far is to set a neighbor track and plock a trig on the first step of each pattern to drop volume to 0 or max depending on when where I want it to be. This works, but eats up a track - which if im using a thru to monitor, a pickup to loop, and a neighbor to trif - thats 3 tracks for one instrument which seems excessive! Need to research if theres a better way. Sure seems like Pickup Machines could/should have trigs, but doesnt seem to.
arranger is super easy actually. and i love it. seems totally ridiculous this feature isnt on the DT because it obviously could be added easily, but whatever. I figured out the issue with talking to the DT and DN was that it doesnt work with all channels set to āautoā. The midi channels need to be specified. A little annoying - Id think elektron gear would be able to talk to each other easily, but I guess this is the whole different generations thing - then again, isnt that the whole idea of a mk2???
I get the appeal of the crossfader. I meanā¦ the swipe to narrow filter effect or tempo change is very over used, but it still works and is so fun and tempting to over use myself. I get it. cool feature that ill have to stop myself from throwing in.
I love the slices and slot modes - again, sure seems like something that could EASILY be on the DT. tbh I can already see that Ill have a difficult time doing away with the DT as I had thought might be possible, but I still prefer the sound and feel of the DT as a dedicated drum machine. Maybe with more time ill get into the OT groove on that, but im already running out of tracks with my other gear going through the OT. But I really wish the DT had the slots/slice mode.
All and all im starting to get it. It still isnt the magic bullet for sound, but is shaping up to be a very effective swiss army knife - mixer, effects, looper, arranger. Albeit somewhat (unnecessarily) complicated in terms of UI.
A few minor requests for future updates - trigs on pickup machines. clearer notation in the interface which tracks are muted. Im very slightly color blind and cant tell the difference between the yellow and green LEDs they use which is annoying.
In general, the UI needs to borrow more from the DT. Its a mk2! should have more than a facelift.
and for the love of god - why is there not an āUNDOā button???
thanks again for the encouragement. im sticking with it for now and can tell that it may be inserting itself as an essential piece of my set up. I wish I didnt still feel like I need the DT. but weāll see.
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No, it isnāt. There is also nothing which you can call āmk2 uiā, because mark (mk) models are simply refined hardware models. They are not meant to be the next iteration regarding functionality like a v2.
There is so much more you can do with the crossfader than filter and tempo changes. Another standard use case is to blend in and out tracks like blend out a live signal while blending in a recorded loop of it (pattern transition trick).
You can also use the crossfader to select different sample slices on a track. In a way thatās like scrolling through a wavetable.
As I said: there is so much more to it. Just become creative (or read some threads here).
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Interesting
Thatās just not how midi works. A device that receives midi canāt tell the device itās receiving midi from which channels to use for what.
This is not Elektrons fault or an oversight, thatās just how midi works.
āAutoā does not mean automatic btw, it refers to the auto channel.
Midi 2.0 is around the corner and weāll se a lot of new features, but midi is from '84 soā¦
The digi line is basically Elektrons take on āsimpler and more accesibleā imho.
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From 
manual: āWhen moving the crossfader, locked scene parameters have priority over parameter locks. This ensures smooth transitions between scene parameters without the sudden changes that might be caused by parameter locks.ā
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Ohhh I knew that. I thought you were saying for your personal workflow you prioritize scene locks over parameter locks
Gotcha. I guess I donāt know. I thought thatās the only way to do it. If you parameter lock something, but it is also locked to a scene, the scene lock takes priority. Is there a way to make the parameter locks have priority? Just curious.
Oh my god this 
I have no idea what is going on half the time as Iām quite red/green colourblind. Happens with other gear too but the extra confusion of the OT in general makes it chaos lol
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Tricks like mute/unmute trigs with VOL assignments on crossfader.
(Correct me if wrong)
Priority order :
External midi
Lfo
Crossfader
Plocks
Track parameters
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Iāve been using mine for about 3 years and I still managed to spend more than 15 minutes last night trying to troubleshoot a really strange MIDI issue where some video software Iām running on a Raspberry Pi was responding to manual CC changes but not plocks or LFOs, and was halfway through posting a question on here before I noticed that all the MIDI tracks had been muted the whole time and I was so convinced it was some esoteric setting that I didnāt notice.
So donāt feel bad about the learning curve, thereās always something.
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Haha, exactly!! There should be a āstupid human tricksā thread for the OT! I have a few.
The mute learning curve is simpler to draw.
What is your video software / raspberry thing?
(Really interested in).
Iām running a slightly customized version of R_E_C_U_R as the video player in a mostly feedback and keying based live video setup thatās made from a couple 90s video mixers, three Raspberry Pis and a 3trinsrgb+1c.
Iām also looking at using the LFOs in the Octatrack to modulate the brush position in an open source Pi video paint program, but there are some things about the way it handles MIDI right now that keep it from working the way I want it to.
The way Iāve been using R_E_C_U_R isnāt really how it was meant to be used, and itās easy to lock up the video engine doing what I do. So far it seems to happen a lot more when I use the Octatrack, unfortunately, so Iāll probably be going back to suing the MBSeq for it, but hopefully Iāll be able to get it working with the video paint eventually.
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