Driving slices from slide or lfo

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Apologies if this has been discussed, but couldn’t find anything in a few searches.

I got an octatrack a couple weeks ago, and seem to be getting the hang of it reasonably well but something I played with today doesn’t really gel so looking for advice.

I started looking into optimising my tracks through resampling (eg I have a couple drum samples spread across a couple tracks which I bounce to a single waveform by recording from the cue channel). Auto slice grid and record trigs ensure I have a nicely sliced sample.

Clever me thought I would be able to then use the slide function to interpolate slices across 64 steps (eg put a trig on step 1 and 64, plock the start setting on each, then use slide to fill the gaps between). Effectively saving the need to punch in every start position on every trig for a 64 slice sample. No matter what I attempt in terms of settings this doesn’t work at all though. Tried looping the sample, tried setting slide and sample trigs on every step, nothing seems to work. I don’t get a discernable or consistent result.

So I thought maybe the LFO is a better option but I can’t get a clear idea on tempo sync settings and I suspect that because the LFOs are bipolar they can’t just do a clean upward ramp from 1-64. Basically finding the same issue here where I’m not getting the expected results.

Anyone have any pointers?

Side note - I’m aware I could just leave the sample unsliced and play it from a single trig, but I wanted to get a better understanding here of the behaviours of slide and lfo to exploit them creatively.

#2

Slides or lfos can modulate trigs (change their parameters), but they can not generate the trigs themselves.

1 Like
#3

yes that is obvious. id assume having the track sample set to loop on and modulating start point thru slide would have a discernable effect however.

#4

With Slice mode on, the slices can’t be modulated after the sample has been triggered.

It’s possible, with Slice mode off. The 128 start values can be modulated by the lfo, and probably with slides. So it works with a 128 evenly spaced sliced sample.

However, there can be some artefacts with lfos, not happening with crossfader control if you want to use wavetables…
I didn’t try after 1.40.

1 Like
#5

digging some more it appears that the slide functionality in octatrack has regressed from the old elektron boxes (having owned a mnm and md in the past) so perhaps slides are out of the question for this use case. (ie slide only interpolates plocks to the next sample trig in ot, not the next slide trig).

so perhaps the more pertinent question is whats the easy way to set up an lfo to sequentially iterate through each sample start, assuming a trigger on each step?

1 Like
#6

righteo, so logic wise its locked to the trigger event. might play around with slice mode off…

1 Like
#7

had a bit more of a play. slide interpolation of slices is possible if you exploit retrig settings. set rtime to 1.0 with enough retrigs to fill your pattern.

on a track with slices on, loop off.

trig 1
start sl1, retrig 16, rtime 1.0

trig 16
start sl16, retrig 1, rtime whatever.

slide trig on trig 1.

seems like even though retrigs can be set to something like 127, theyll stop retriggering around the 3rd bar so you would need to tweak these settings for subsequent bars.

1 Like
#8

Afaik, INF is max value, so it shouldn’t stop…
Edit : maybe with slides it’d work better with retrig set to INF on target step, followed by a trig with retrig 1 value, -23/384 microtiming.

1 Like
#9

yeh was a weird one, maybe i had some orphan trigger somewhere breaking everything. anyway problem is solved for now, and now i have all the trigs in between the slides free to mess the pattern up at will. :wink:

#10

I edited ly previous post, maybe you shouldn’t set slide’s target trig to Retrig = 1.

1 Like
#11

After messing around for a while my recommendation is to just put slides on every trig, and plock the first and last trig of each bar to the appropriate slice.

Eg trig 1 - SL1, retrig inf, rtime 1.0
trig 16 - Sl16, retrig 1

Repeat for bars 2-4, slices 17+32, 33+48, 49+64 as needed.

Once that’s done you can mess with the sequence in enjoyable ways by putting down a couple trigs randomly per bar, plocking a random slice index or rate. Good for jamming as you can revert to the unmangled pattern by removing trigs other than 1&16

3 Likes
#12

This sounds like a cool way of doing it! Gonna mess with it later, cheers for sharing :wink:

My most used slice technique atm is using sync LFOs and scenes to mess with looping slice patterns. Also noticed you can use rotate pos to start in AED with the sequencer running to shift the slice order for more variation.