Good ideas for live processing

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

I’m looking for ideas on how to get the most out of the OT for live sampling, first for drones, and then maybe for rhythmic but not 4-on-the-floor stuff. tl;dr: those of you that use OT for live-sampling droney stuff, what do you do? And do you run the sequencer or just manually trigger samples?

Last night my drummer was away, and my guitarist and I decided to try him making noises and me live-sampling with the OT. It’s been years since I’ve done anything like that (bought my OT in 2011) and I’m rusty (even had to look up how to save a scene on my mk1!).

Here are things I tried:

Pickup machine to match tempo. Worked great.
Neighbour machines to stack effects. Fine.
Sampling little bits of audio into flex machines on other tracks. Awesome.
The filter sounds as great as I remember.
Scenes are super fun.

But it’s the realtime audio mangling I’m having a harder time with.

With the sequencer running, it’s easy to start and juggle parts of samples.
But most of the time I had the sequencer off so I could trigger things manually.
A lot of things started to sound grainy pretty quickly with pitch shifting or speeding up/slowing down.
So I’m looking for alternatives:
comb filter was ok but I didn’t find anything I loved; also sounded grainy a lot of the time.

Of course I could easily set up something on an iPad with Koala and Loopy Pro, but then I’m bringing an audio interface and controllers into the mix. The brilliance of the OT is that it’s a single machine.

TIA for your thoughts on how to develop this inside the OT. Obviously I can add other gear but for now I’m just interested if it’s worth getting my OT skills back up to snuff for this “side project.”

2 Likes
#2

Definitely.

I would strongly recommend taking a little time to learn the LFO possibilities including the custom wave shapes, and the plays free mode for tracks in combination with lock/trigless trigs, just because those tools give you so much extra capability to go deep into sound design and mangling beyond the surface level stuff. Even if you can’t immediately think of a use for them I guarantee you’ll go “ooh, I bet I could do this with x” at some point.

One quick tip I can give for cool droney or rhythmic stuff is to exploit feedback via pickup machines: Set up a pickup machine to record from CUE and set it to overdub-replace so it’s constantly overwriting itself, and then raise the CUE output for that track so it starts feeding back into itself (you’ll need to use studio mode for individual main/cue levels). Feed it with something from another track and you’ve got a very configurable and potentially long delay effect, apply FX and LFOs to create all kinds of smooth or harsh textures, and it’s even possible to alter pitch and timestretch in the feedback signal path…

You’ll want to filter or EQ out the sub frequencies otherwise it tends to distort like crazy, and a lot of effects with resonant peaks will make it go crazy too but you can potentially ameliorate that with some LFO usage.

Another quick tip with the LFOs is that you can actually get finer control of things like pitch or rate if you modulate them with an LFO that applies a constant offset with a custom wave shape. Might be useful for fine tuning or making things sound more gradual.

In general if things sound quite grainy to you maybe just apply some filtering after the effect to roll off the high end or bandpass so it sounds ‘smoother’. That will probably be beneficial for the mix anyway. Also try turning time stretch on/off if you haven’t already, the time stretch algo is pretty old school which I kinda like but it can sound quite choppy. Sometimes simple rate shifting is nice enough though again that’s quite a coarse algo.

Don’t forget that you can always resample anything to further filter or layer stuff. It’s quite doable in a realtime live scenario with a bit of practice, but MIDI controllers and foot switches can make it a lot more immediate and straightforward once you set things up.

Slices are something worth experimenting with too, you can pre-slice a buffer and if a new recording is the same length the slices will fit the same. This allows you to do fun live chopping of incoming audio.

Oh and one more thing; there’s a little exploit that allows you to put a reverb effect on the FX1 slot, by copy/pasting it over. It doesn’t show the UI so you can’t alter it once you paste it over but it will process audio through it. Note that it’s super buggy in that some tracks work ok with particular reverb FX while others might produce horrible noise, this video someone made goes through some of the possibilities -

TLDW the spring reverb works great in any track. Adding FX on top of that can get really fun.

6 Likes
#3

FLEX.
Pickups are ok to overdub drones, but totally sucks for audio mangling. I mean almost direct sample playback modulations.

If you want pitch up, recording have to be finished.

I wouldn’t recommend to use slices for live mangling before you master OT recorders + Flex. Slices are usable once the recording is done.
They can be used in a drony way : you can set tuned slices at the beginning of the recording.
But it is pretty complicated.

Many possibilities.
I’d encourage you to start from scratch with nothing plugged, no samples.

Use CUE for feedback.

I posted these many times, but these are based on “realtime” processing of incoming audio only, using rec trigs each 2 steps (average), Flex to play them.
No extra samples. A friend of mine didn’t get it until he played it…very unique, but it needs preparation.

I have some recipes for realtime processing, but you need to dive in OT Rec/Flex.

3 Likes
#4

Thanks. Just to be clear, pickup was ONLY for an initial loop to set tempo (unless you’re suggesting I avoid pickup entirely and set tempo another way). I’d then dump that recording into a flex machine if I wanted to process it.

But lots to dig through here.

#5

Ok, easy to record with a Pickup, swap to another pattern with another part using a Flex instead, using the same recording buffer, previously prepared plocks, scenes, etc on all playback parameters you can access with Pickups.

But…this is not live processing.

Other approach overdubing with Flex (can be used for dronish stuff, end part)

1 Like
#6

I will do my homework and report back.

1 Like
#7

If you want to avoid the transients that you get from repeating the same sample or slice, don’t forget to use the loop=PIPO setting in SRC secondary menu.
This way your sample is played back and forth, can be good for drones.

Layering is also a good thing, either with the same sample with different fx, or with other textures like crowd voices, city noises, electric hum or whatever you can put in the background.

1 Like
#8

Okay, just watched them all. Really brilliant use of the comb filter and feedback. This last one is my absolute favourite of them all.

But: a couple questions:

  1. They all have the sequencer running. Is that necessary or is there a way to manually trigger things?

  2. If I’m doing things manually, is the best way to let my guitarist play, tap tempo, and then manually record into a flex machine?

1 Like
#9

You can trigger recording then playback manually, or both with external midi. I find it more convenient with the sequencer.

  1. Tracks can be independant, so it is possible to sync some tracks, an do things manually on other tracks…
#10

Thanks. I’m going to woodshed a bit this weekend and come with more questions.

I have one more for now:

I understand that playing back from a pickup machine is super limited. But if I used one to on track 1 to set tempo, kept it muted, and then also loaded sample slot 1 on track 2 in a flex machine, I’d get the benefits of both (pickup sets and can reset tempo; flex provides maximum sound mangling) at the cost of losing a track, right? Or am I missing something?

1 Like
#11

You can mix and match to your heart’s content and set it up the way it works for you, that’s the beauty of the OT. I have one track set to a pickup so I can quickly record a loop and set a tempo, the rest are flex/static/thru. Works great.

1 Like
#12

Seems a good idea !

You can also do a part change to save a track.
Part 1 T1 Pickup
Part 2 T1 Flex

1 Like
#13

I think you got that right, yeah. I do that whenever I use pickups. I use the pickup machine as another sound source, but then use flex for manipulation. The pickup limitations are annoying, but there are still some pretty useful things in there, especially if I’m just exploring sounds.

3 Likes