Evolving arpeggiator

Elektron Gear Octatrack
1

Hi, I’m on the verge of buying an OT and moving away from my laptop…

So my planned setup is minimal - OT for beats and atmosphere, + one Prophet 08 Synth controlled by midi.

Evolving the sounds past the “obvious patterns” will be my primary concert - my experience from earlier Elektron machines (particulary MD and MnM) is that having a project span several patterns can be quite a chore, especially as the project evolves and you want changes to apply everywhere - might just be me here, but I really want to avoid having a lot of different patterns.

So the question comes to the arpeggiator which will be important - how can I have the arpeggiator “evolve” over time? Eq, I want to track to scale but it cannot follow the exact same pattern, eg the progression might change from a major to a minor chord and as such, arpeggiators individual notes should be affected - how could I do such changes (possibly live) to the base chord witout having to “re program” separate patterns so to speak or get strange results live as I adjust accordingly? Possibly if I have several arpeggiators (different tracks) then enable/disable them?

2

I’m not shure if I understood your problem in the right way.
But if I understood it right, the solution for you is working with “parts”.
You have four of them for each bank. So lets say you are playing a pattern. All tracks are in C may. This is saved to “Part 1”. Now you change every trach to D min. This is saved to “Part 2”. Now you only have to change the parts and all tracks jump from C may to D min and back.

3

eight MIDI tracks for one synth should be plenty to play around with. each track has its own arp pattern. you can also LFO arp parameters. lots to explore just with mutes really.

edit: didn’t mean to sound like i was discouraging using parts. was typing as tubman posted. i would suggest getting comfortable with the machine using one part to begin with though.

4

Ah! Thanks for excellent input - I guess both approaches can be used - several midi tracks - or this “Parts” aspect I didn’t even know existed :slight_smile: More manual reading for me!