1

Dog willing, I’ll have an OT by the end of the year. I’m planning to use it as the hub of my studio, but the other primary reason I want it is for jamming with other people. I have an experimental project with a drummer in which I sample and tweak a lot of his audio on the fly, and have tried to work with a DJ to do similar things, and the OT seems like the perfect idea to expand upon this. What are your favorite vids and techniques that demonstrate the power of the Octatrack for this purpose?

2

Recently I was doing some of that with an orchestral percussionist. Here’s a rundown of what I was doing.

I have three or four OT “sampler” tracks pre-set with certain playback and filter parameters, LFO actions, and effects.

All tracks have re-trig set either very high, or all the way to INF. After triggering a fresh sample, I’ll play with the re-trig time in real time.

Some of the tracks have the slider controlling the start point of the sample, ranging 1-127. With others, I control the start time continuously.

I’d sample him into a track for maybe four bars, get an interesting loop going, then select the next track and sample him again. In practice, I never had more than two tracks going at once; two alone rendered such interesting results, that between the OT and him going nuts with his own effect chain, things could get pretty insane. (Not that that’s a bad thing…)

I manually synced the tempo to him, periodically re-applying the manual Tap function if things got too far off.

The only real challenge was performing the Record action in a way that didn’t have a tiny bit of space at the front. If that happens, you can just set the start time knob to 1, or even open the editor and change the start time there, but with a little practice you can avoid all that.

Here’s an edit of what we were doing.
https://soundcloud.com/talbot-sound/thankful
If you listen, bear in mind that you’re also hearing a lot of Eventide processor on his rig, and on the OT. There’s also some MD, Jomox kick, and Virus.
We went on like this for almost two hours, it was Thanksgiving Eve and we were in serious party mode :wink:

3

My current technique - a simplified version of what abergdahl used to do - I sample my own instrument playing but I’m sure I could sample someone else too.

Setup:

  1. Set up Track 1 as pickup machine track.
  2. Set up Track 2 as pickup machine track
  3. Assign flex machine to track 3 and set its Sample Slot to Track 1 recorder buffer
  4. Assign flex machine to track 4 and set its Sample Slot to Track 2 recorder buffer

Performance:

  1. Record loop in master pickup machine track (Track 1)
  2. Record loop in slave pickup machine track (Track 2)
  3. In Track 3, set sample trigs, create slice grid, create random locks
    4.In Track 4, do same thing as Track 3, except maybe with different number of slices or something
  4. At some point, start the sequencer to trigger the sample trigs in Tracks 3 and 4. I often have the levels on them turned all the way down so I can fade them in.
  5. Mess around with track LFOs, effects settings, playback settings, etc.

Some examples: https://soundcloud.com/governorsilver

4

With some micro timing you can do some real-time-time-stretching. I did this with a friend doing vocals. Pretty insane.

Definitely tap in your drummer’s tempo. Set up linear or random trigs and create new slice grid after each recording with a new tempo.

5

Can the OT adjust timing automatically to incoming midi notes or audio? I swear I saw something about that in one of the product videos. The drummer I work with has triggers on his acoustic kit, which we have used to trigger midi on my MD, but it would be cool if it could automagically adjust.