Great, thanks! I might have tried this before when I seen the other thread, but will have to attempt again!
Hah, great!
I have a (experimental music) gig coming up in December and still looking for ways to make the OT “do more” than “just” its usual shenanigans…
this might make it into my set in some way 
With nothing plugged, the trickiest thing is to engage feedback with control. I found something efficient : have a track recording input ABCD with max mixer gain.
With incoming signal, or a sample, the easiest is CUE recording, with CUE sends, or any track (except T8 set to Master).
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I find a little bit of crossfader sliding and random transcoder action usually gets something to happen. I kind of like the anticipation. Although it could be a bit nervy in a live setting- you know those gigs where people are asking ‘have they started?’
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Has anyone experimented with adding external mixers, effects units, or modular into the equation of the feedback loop of the Octatrack? Was thinking about doing this, might be interesting… Or should I just stick with standalone feedback Octa with samples…?
I’ve been playing with your method this afternoon… Splendid results! But oooooh my poor ears haha.
Good results with a neighbor with SRR and delay modulated with crossfader (SRR stronger and stronger, delay time going from wide to super fast…).
Now, a stupid question, but: what is creating the sound in your setup? It’s not like the filter res is so high that it pings with whatever noise there is internally…
Feedback of a track recording itself IIRC!
(Microtiming needed).
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Haha, yeah, I know, I’ve replicated it! I mean from a “scientific” point of view: why does the act of setting up a track recording itself create sound? How did you think about putting a filter and a reverb here? Why?
Dunno. 
But it’s a fact, common to different gear.
Experimentation. 
I previously noticed that filter could change feedback tuning. Delay or reverb allows you to increase feedback.
To prove that OT can do audio synthesis!
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You sure proved it on many occasions! 
Each time I learn something new (in music or elsewhere), I NEED to know the physics of it and why things move the way they move to make this new knowledge mine.
I’ve watched some videos on no input mixers and feedbacks with hardware reverbs to try and get it. But each time, the starting point seems to be the noise generated internally by the mixer. What leaves me quite puzzled is that since we feedback internally, there shouldn’t be any noise picked along the way, dammit!
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F#ck, I get some amazing textures with the cue setup you use for the shimmer. My Buena Vista Social Club sample has become quite the screamer. DJ EQ can really shape the feedback sound!
Major “oh shit, I finally get it!” moment.
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I’m not certain, but I suspect there’s something mathematical at work: if you create the conditions for feedback, feedback will happen.
From a more practical perspective: there’ll always be noise in the signal path, from capacitors trickling out, from “lazy” electrons swimming around resistors & transistors, from interference and induction of one part of a circuit on another, from interference from the PSU (not in OT, but in general); maybe even from interference from other EM in the room.
Taking it back to formless speculation: if energy and matter are interchangeable, is space ever a vacuum?
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Also, ghosts.
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Yeah, there’s a small bug trapped under my screen. I guess he’s the one making all the sounds.
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Feedback with a track recording CUE, sent to CUE.
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You can google Barkhausen stability criterion to understand why feedback is generating sound (oscillations), oscillators also use feedback to generate a wave and a clipping circuit to stabilize the oscillations.
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Bit of a necro-response but no input feedback results due to the inherent noise in any system. The noise floor is fed back to it self, and those frequencies that are present are amplified (since that is what the noise is) over and over again into a loop until we get feedback. That’s why changing the delay between the return changes the sound (it alters the frequency of the loop) and also why adding fx between can be useful.
Artists who have explored this include Pauline Oliveros, Elaine Radigue, Alvin Lucier, Toshi Nakamura and David Lee Meyers to name just a few.
Here’s one of Toshi’s latest no-input mixing board releases (one of my favourites):
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