Hi everyone. I’m new to the Octatrack and to Elektron gear, bear with me. I’ve really been enjoying lurking on this forum and gleaning massive insider knowledge on this beast of a machine - cheers for that.
Now I need help. One of the ways that I want to incorporate the OT into my set up is to have it streaming my backing tracks when we play live. It will be sequencing and manipulating my Tempest as well and (eventually) sampling. on the fly.
But first things first:
I’m having a hell of a time figuring out a work flow that makes sense for the backing track part - I’ve googled around for a week and read a few posts on the subject in this forum but after many more hours on the machine I’m still kind of scratching my head. I’ve got one shots figured out and the arranger too. At the heart of my confusion is this: Is there a way to have a machine trigger a different sample in a different bank or does the sample assignment for each machine (and each track) stay constant throughout the project for every pattern and bank? I’ve read about plocking samples but for a sample to be available to be plocked it still has to be loaded into a machine in the project does it not? (and therefor still eating up a slot)
In my head it works like this: I have one bank per song with each bank containing 2 or 3 machines playing the stems of the song’s backing tracks and leaving me the other 4 or 5 tracks for thru / midi machines etc. When the arranger switches banks, I’m onto song 2 with new backing tracks on my static machine, and new … whatever, midi and stuff haha.
Right now samples that I assign stay assigned in every bank and pattern of a project which makes me think that I actually need to have each song in it’s own project (which kind of sucks for switching songs live).
Am I missing something?
I’m re reading the chapter on ‘Parts’ right now. Could these be my answer?
Parts are the answer. To minimize your confusion, I recommend pulling down Merlin’s thoughts on the Octatrack PDF from the files section.
There’s tons of good info in there, but the key for your situation is that Patterns store triggers and parameter locks. Parts store everything else (machine type per track, samples assigned to that machine, everything in the Setup pages, etc)
Also remember - you can sample lock different samples on the same track, so that can add some variety (and save on the track count).
Thanks for your reply!
I have Merlin’s PDF but it was pretty over my head when I first read it. Thanks for the reminder to check back in…
A few other questions that have now popped up after getting into Parts:
is there a way to unload a sample from a machine but keep the sample in the slot? Like if I want to “empty” a machine but retain the sample in slot 2 to use somewhere else how do I do that? Is it just a matter of making sure my slots are always loaded from slot 9 onwards and keeping the track slots empty?
This was what confused me about sample locks before as I had only loaded samples in slots 1 - 8 and then was trying to plock them all to track one AND free up machines 1 - 7. My work around now is loading from slot 9 and onwards. I feel like I must just be missing an easy key combo to un-assign a sample.
Finally, would there be any disadvantage to stacking all of my backing tracks on one track as one shot hits with sample p locks? For instance having track 1 loaded with 10 different 5 minute long backing tracks and copying that track over many patterns and leaving me the other 7 tracks to use for everything else.
edit: it seems like stacking one shots would mean that I’d have to manually drop the trigs on the track when I wanted them to play otherwise they all trig…
Cheers!