Goddam the Octatrack is a great piece of gear

Just needed to be said.

Carry on now.

It needs to be said one more time…

yeeeaa haha

I keep having these moments too. Goddam right its a beautiful machine.

I get the this feeling every few sessions now, where Im just like DAMN, this motherfucker is the FIRE!

Love me some OT something’ fierce.

Call me a fanboy and I’ll be ur fanboy, lol.

I gotta jump, and say yes.

After about 5 years, from the earliest struggles to understand it, to now… this thing is amazing.

I might have been too stupid to really get the OT at first, but now I am beyond glad I hung until enlightenment!

I love the OT so much I’m thinking about going steady with mine.

As someone who is just getting started on the learning curve it would be cool to hear what some of the “holy shit this machine is amazing” moments have been lately. What were you doing when you had that moment last? Might be a cool way for some of us novice users to discover workflows we might not yet have stumbled upon…

I love OT’s so much, I left my wife at home on Valentines Day to go watch Dubathonic play his…voyer
Shhh…my OT doesn’t know. :wink:

hahahahaahahahahaha!!!

I love seeing other Octa’s being worked into a frenzy… don’t tell mine :wink:

polyrhythms, slices, scenes, triggerless plocking, assigning slice # to crossfader on breaks / beats / sounds
I don’t really even know where to start… the midi sequencing is also amazing, plocking midi cc’s on external gear, I’ve only done a little of that, but that’s amazing too.

The Octatrack’s eight-armed love is all around us.

have to say, the only way to appreciate OT is to take the hard path.
read the manual (which is a bit like the car manual you find in the glove box. It won’t teach you to drive but it’s all technically in there)

Do each step below for a week each, in no particular order:

try use the OT like Ableton (load up 20 slots of loops dumped from an ableton single song set for example), use the arranger, use parts
then try it as a live looper inputting another instrument (maybe get a midi footpedal, guitar, octave-dropper pedal)
then use it as a loop slicer and grid randomizer.
then p-lock it (and understand trigless trigs etc)
try the crossfader & scenes
then use the LFOs.
get used to using the track trigs, the chromatic trigs, the slot trigs to compose.
then try a minimalist source Science Challenge.
then sync it with other elektron boxes and repeat all of the above.
then use internal re-sampling
then connect a ipad/iphone with some synths on it and sample them/sequence them
plug in an extra outboard effects rack like TC Fireworx as a further mangling send loop, re-sample

Agree with Mokomo. It’s a hard path. The curse of the OT is that it’s a completely different beast/tool to every other user. Some love the it as a sequencer, some use it like a synth, some stick to sampling, etc, etc. So a “eureka” moment to me will most likely be a “yeah thats a little bit cool but meh” moment for you!
Over the year and a half I’ve had a few key moments - recently using it for vocal mangling based on the OT thread on granular uses has been a complete blast. Quantised recording was another moment when I thought “yeah, this is cool”.
From what I found, trial and error, asking questions here and watching youtube clips have all helped me find those big moments of grin inducing fun.
Final tip - keep coming at the OT like you would some other traditional instrument you are trying to learn. You just wont pick this thing up in a couple of months and get the most out of it. I wouldn’t expect to be able to do that with a guitar for example. Stick with it and you will be rewarded and it will feel all the better for the graft you put in with learning it.

I Love my OT…Up to now i’ve been using it mainly as a studio inspirational writing tool but I’m now some way into constructing a nice compact live rig with the OT as the hub, AR also included with Minitaur, Xoxbox and a few other bits…I feel like im about to embark on another OT fuelled journey of discovery…!! Exciting times!!!

Totally agree with the hard path on the OT and actually enjoying every minute of it. Just enjoying hearing you guys describe how you use it because sometimes you get locked in a rut doing the same things. The stuff above is awesome!

Finally found love. :heart:

(In the end it was the trigless plocks that did it for me)

Nice to watch this sunrise of positivity :smiley: ya know…

a recent success of mine was described here (including the workflow): The Octatrack can be quite granular-esque [example inside]
you can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/nikofeyn/rough-sketch-7-canyon-a-granular-guitar-piece