I promise you, do not dismay!
I’m on my 3rd day using this and I swear I nearly lost my mind … At one point I was worried I’d never get it to work for me.
Here’s what I want to tell you … I was just able to really master grid and regular sampling and as soona s I got it I was like OOOOOkaaaaaay. I see now.
What I originally thought was unnecessary complexity is actually the open environment nature of this device. There’s oftan multiple ways to do the same thing. This isn’t because it’s chaotic, it’s because Elektron designed this to be a platform that you can kind of built a workflow in a modular way, and the ways are almost infinite. Everything can be connected in ways you decide and so the initial learning curve is so damn intense.
Many devices are designed to walk you through a workflow, but this one says “OK, here are all the building blocks, design your own workflow”. Coming from the deluge I knew I didn’t want to use this as a drum machine. I wanted to chop up my beats from my drum machines, recreate them, and then record multitrack sections of my songs and kind of remix them before recording into Ableton. Kind of an MPC workflow and then recording into an arrangement into the DAW. So this is my workflow, but you may have a different one.
For example: I initially thought when sampling, “Why am I not seeing any visual feedback for this sample coming in? There’s no record light on, and no waveform?”. Well the answer is, you can hit the AED button, where you will edit your sample, and before editing the sample this screen will show you the waveform of the audio as it’s recorded.
Here’s what I suggest:
- Read the Merlin guide while you’re sitting around somewhere.
- Decide ahead of time how you want to work with this thing, or just choose something you want to learn.
- Watch this “Simple Sampling” video from Cuckoo, it’s a MKI but it doesn’t matter, the devices are more similar than I had thought originally. video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJT_JoWO2tU
- Then watch this quick and dirty Elektron series until you know the basics. Watch the videos and try to mimick these processes. Use the manual as a reference to really understand the button combinations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w_PlGzqTYM
I promise you, once you see this is a really complicated environment that you need to learn in chuncks you’ll have an appreciation for how bananas this thing is. In a way, I feel like I neeeded to use the deluge to understand the Octatrack. It’s a sampler, but it’s not a sampler. Like the famous “This is not a pipe”. This is whatever you want it to be. Thank god for YouTube, can you imagine no forums and no video tutorials and trying to learn this thing? If you did it with just the manual I take my hat off to you and bow.