Finding THE most suitable configuration for Octatrack and external synths

Elektron Gear Octatrack
1

Hello - I am struggling to find the most suitable config for Octatrack and my external synths. I tried many configurations to find the perfect live performance config with no luck. There are always some minor barriers. I am wondering if you can help.

What I’m trying to to achieve:

I want to have live external audio pass-through utilising Octatrack FX and live sample mangling possibilities (slicing, pitch, rate, random trigs etc).

I feed in 4 external synths, each into own input and track (T1, T2, T3, T4). I don’t want to use Master Track as I have a mixer plugged after OT for this purpose.

What I’ve tried so far?

  1. Using Thru Machines

This just allows me to play the audio through OT and apply FX. It’s not what I’m looking for.

  1. Flex machine audio pass-through (Max Marco style)

This is the closest I can get. It works ALMOST as I wish to, but sampling is limited - pitch and reverse doesn’t work on live input sound. I have to use recording buffer workaround method which I specified below.

  1. Track transition trick

This is also a good example however, with this option, DIR has to be active and I cannot apply OT FX on DIR signal (unless I’m missing something).

  1. Transition using Parts (Mr Dataline style)

Using thru track on Part 1, and flex with time stretching on Part 2. This works kind of okay however, FXs are not mirrored when changing parts, so if I have custom FX set on part 1 and I change to part 2 (which has different FX values) and then back to Part 1, it will sound very glitchy, especially if I apply different delay settings.

Solution number 2 (Flex audio pass-through) in companion with pattern change works best however, it’s missing live sample mangling features with pitch and rate. Okay, there is a workaround but it’s not intuitive. After a loops is recorded I would have to remove record trig, change flex src timestrech to ON, play with pitch, rate etc. and then reload the part + add record trig if I want to go back to the live input signal. Also, if I use pattern with P locks, this will be also applied on the live signal when I decide to go back from sample mangling to live signal (workaround is to use pattern change).

Basically I want to have a smooth transition from sample mangling to live signal. Is there any other configuration worth trying?

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If you only use 4 tracks you could always have thru-machines on 1-4 (or if you don’t need stereo and different effects have multiple inputs into the same thru-machine) and using 5-8 as flex machines, with one shot record trigs and use scenes to transition between them, this will give you a lot of flexibility with the downside of using twice as many channels. You can always combine techniques using flex audio pass through on loops which you are likely not to capture more than once or twice during the set and use a pair of thru and flex for tracks which you will frequently rerecord and switch between live and recorded.

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I just use a thru track for each input, and a single flex set up to record from cue. All sampling is manual, and quantized, no recorder trigs. I just cue the tracks I want sampled, sample it, then choose one of several scenes I have pre-made that have different xlev settings, depending on which tracks I sampled, for the B side of the fader. Then I just get crazy on the fader. It’s pretty seamless for live remixing. To illustrate what I mean about scenes:

Scene 1- thru xlev A/B and C/D 100%, flex xlev 0% (just the thru machines)
Scene 2- thru xlev A/B 100%, C/D 0%, flex xlev 100% (for mangling a recording of C/D)
Scene 3- thru xlev A/B 0%, C/D 100%, flex xlev 100% (for mangling a recording of A/B)
Scene 4- thru xlev A/B and C/D 0%, flex xlev 100% (just the sampled tracks)

Fader side A is usually set to Scene 1, and side B is set to whatever else is appropriate.

This is just a basic example, and there’s a lot of other ways to expand this concept. You could even use recording trigs, but I personally like having access to all flex slices at all times, which you can’t do with recording trigs (no breaking the laws of space time). Even if limited, this technique can sound monstrous with the right slicing and p-locks, just slamming that fader back and forth.

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@Kalle @Zac_Kyoti thank you for your comments guys! I’ve now incorporated both of your suggestions and came up with something interesting. I’ve sacrificed one track for flex machine recording buffer as suggested by Kalle, but with a manual and quantized sampling of internal track source, without recorder trigs. I then set scenes A and B with MIN/MAX crossfader locks and voila! It works somehow as “Track transition trick” but with FX on top of my external sound. I can now sample any of the sources I select, move crossfader, enable timestretching on the recorded flex loop, configure random lfo’s, p-lock trigs, get mad with crossfader again (leave it in the middle for a nice mix of both sources), and if I’m bored, I can just reload the part and start over again. Pretty crazy live remixing! Many thanks for your input.

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