I had my Rytm plugged into my inputs of my Octatrack, using a thru slot I had previously set up for other sounds. As I was trying to recreate a drum beat I couldn’t help but feel like all of my highs were cut off and kept checking my Rytm settings…Nope, the filters are all open. Strange. I guess none of these samples have much high end, and maybe the analog synthesis isn’t as crispy as I thought…But no matter how much I turn up the hi-hat it is still far quieter than the hi-hat I was using on my Octatrack.
So after spending upwards of an hour dialing in my Rytm sounds, I go to put a new FX on the Thru track only to find I already had a LPF on it, with the cutoff around 90 I opened up the filter and nearly deafened myself with my hi-hat and snare!
I of course had to go back and readjust every sound and P locks…
I would say 90% of my facepalm moments were with OT. I felt the “oops I’ve broken it” moment a dozen of times, before getting used to it ^^
Scenes were the culprit more than once.
I developed some kind of debugging workflow for this.
Trying to get a True machine to work on Inputs AB but … everything I tried was a dead end. I went out a bit and when I came back I saw that the source was connected to the… yes… Cue outputs.
Double facepalm. I am the guy who always says: ‘check the cables’ !
Forgetting about the kit structure on the analog series and messing up a sound. Never happens to me with the OT strangely, but something about the kit structure just always makes me forget it’s there until I’ve messed up
Recent one with the OT… had some nice buffers going on. Double tap stop … aaaand, unbeknownst to me at the time that re-arms all your triggers when u hit play again. I am SO used to double tapping stop to stop FX tails and well was surprised why I was getting no sound back until I realised all my buffers had been wiped by silence while trying to play them back. Glad that was a setting in personalise that I could turn off!
It often makes me think that ‘silence’ is the Octatracks natural state. It really is a kind’ve transparent machine, you can work with it live for hours creating all manner of sounds, and what you’re left with on the machine at the end of a session is absolutely nothing…
I very often plug my guitar into the output end of my pedal board, and the amp into the input end, and then waste 10 minutes trying to figure out what’s wrong.
So for my Elektron gear and synths in general, I have everything set up and don’t touch any cables. Ever.
I do this type of thing fairly often if we’re being honest, but I mainly use my OT with my OB6 as I find it great for getting ideas down.
While I was playing back just a 16 step pattern I was getting no sound, so I started pissing about with mixer setting turning up the gain, looking at my one shot rec trig.
Finally realised I’ve selected a diff midi track as I was in the midi seq part, instead of the audio one.
Honestly, I had my FP moments with OT everytime I finally understood another one of its many peculiarities. More like “How can one even think about programming it this way although the intuitive solution (for most users) is so abvious!!”. Like press NO to affirm changes and leave the menu. (Or in the digitakt press YES to abort sampling, AFAIR, haven’t seen each other for a while). And anything that has something to do with the sampling process in the OT
Haha yea again being totally honest, the better I get at using the OT the more dumb mistakes I make…I just know why and how to fix it quickly. For a while I kept forgetting how to open the AED (I have a mark 1) and just kept bringing up banks or something equally silly and getting frustrated that my muscle Memory was being vetoed by my stupid brain.
Spending 20 minutes trying to set up a MIDI controller (Disaster Area Q-Connect) with one of my Chase Bliss pedals. Couldn’t figure out WTF I was doing wrong. Finally noticed that I had the controller plugged in to the Exp input instead of the MIDI input. Doh!
Scenes get me more often than I like to admit. That pesky fader doesn’t always stay where I left it last time I was working on a particular project. Most of my WTF, head-scratch moments with OT are related to forgetting about a scene.
I had a pretty insane one a couple months ago that I honestly still can’t believe.
Been using the A4 for years as just a standalone synth. Recently started using it pretty heavily to sequence external gear. Every time I’d want to make a new midi sequence, I’d be flipping through all my patterns, making sure I wasn’t overwriting a synth pattern that I’d previously made on the A4.
Until I realized…I can just make a brand new project for external midi sequences, leaving all my old patterns untouched. Mega-facepalm.
I opened up the filter and nearly deafened myself with my hi-hat and snare!
