It’s incredibly faltering but undeniably powerful. At each level you hit new frustrations. I’ve just started going beyond (deep) one pattern noodles. And I keep remembering much too late that changes I make to machines in one pattern can affect the rest. I know why, I just forget. Compared to digitakt it’s a bit like finding that when you take some eggs out of the fridge it fucks the central heating.
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The pattern thing has its pros and cons for sure. I like it, because it makes finishing tracks easier because if you filter a sound to give another one room its changed on every pattern for example.
Forgetting things is a problem, ot needs to be a bit like your instrument. You have to use it every second day to stay in the flow. I had some frustration at the beginning too, but after using a lot, most things make sense.
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Case in point. Just resampled a loop from master on t7, sounded great, mashed it up, messed about, had great fun, saved as new project, went back to the old one, realised I’d lost the resample because I didn’t manually save it and assign to free flex and then select that flex slot on t7 (multiple stupid steps they could fix in firmware update) and I’d made lots of changes so recreating the original master sample would be hard. That sort of thing. Fuck that.
They could make me love this machine if they just had features to auto save buffers, or one click to say "save all buffers, assign to flex or static slots, select those slots for whatever track machines were previously using those corresponding record buffers ".
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Loving it again now.
Basically if you accept that the octatrack is dreadful it’s brilliant.
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Here’s some inspiration for you Octanauts if you are feeling burnt out on the Octatrack.
Take one synth (or a groovebox if you prefer)
Plug it in to OT
Have each track on OT be a thru track
Have the first effect of each track be a EQ or Filter
Set the frequency of each track differently
Set different effects on FX slot 2 for each track.
Play your synth and have fun exploring
You can get some really cool patches by exploring distortion/compressor at different frequencies.
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Yep. Can be interesting on drums too. Filters set to 24 db.
Isolate kicks, snare, hihat/cymbals.
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That’s so cool!
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A friend of mine has a Liven XFM, and as far as price:performance I can’t think of anything better in hardware right now. Full, 4 op FM with nearly control-per-parameter editing for around $200 USD! Sure the Volca FM is cheaper and has 6op with DX compatibility, but it’s also tiny without any real deep editing capability and a much more limited sequencer.
PreenFM looks excellent, I’ve had my eyes on them for a long time and now that my TX802 is having problems I’d probably build one if I could afford to, but it also doesn’t have much in the way of performance control (plus DIY only and PCBs are out of production). For me personally, I’d either go with PreenFM or maybe a MIDIbox FM but as far as off the shelf stuff, I’m really impressed by the XFM (and the Liven stuff in general, I’ve had an 8bit Warps since launch and I really like it even though it doesn’t have a home in my setup right now.
Just throwing that out there so it’s on people’s radar, it’s a good, affordable instrument if you need some performance oriented FM.
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MEGAfm is easily my favourite of the current FM synth offerings, really can’t be doing with the shifty menu diving style of programming on the others. The Mk.II is a fair bit less noisy than the Mk.I in most of the YT demos if that’s a concern, but still has some unique character and dirt so not ideal if you’re looking for super clean glassy tones I guess.
Think I accidentally opened up a FM rabbit hole here, sorry for that. Maybe continue that discussion somewhere else and stick with ways to love the OT here.
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I’ve never owned or used an OT, and I’m already frustrated with it. Makes me want to get one.
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Not owning just the one is frustrating, imagine not owning three after the first two were so frustrating that you had to not sell them to retain your sanity.
Not owning just the one has saved you a stack of cash, pat yourself on the back! 
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loving this 
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Buy an SP404mkII in the hopes that it will be a simpler and more fun stereo sampler. Spend a few hours learning how it works, and then run back into the arms of your OT which you now finally appreciate and love.
This has been my experience this weekend.
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As I contemplate buying my first one (of many sell-off/re-buy causality loops), could you all please rate what is most painful in order from most to least?
1 - Stubbing your toe on the corner of your bed frame
2 - Thrusting bamboo shoots underneath your fingernails
3 - Learning to use the Octatrack
#3 requires #1 and #2, so I’m not sure it’s really quantifiable in that way.
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Not familiar with that one, I have to take a look! I forgot DAFM (the Genesis/Megadrive soundchip synth, although they have versions fo rother OPL-family chips now, too). I got one early in its life on and it’s quite good but fell off my radar for a while because the early versions like my first one couldn’t run later firmware that fixed some early design missteps, and since it’s a single person operation (or was back then) it took a year and a half to get the free replacement board so I could run the good firmware. It’s definitely worthy if you want that particular flavor of FM, though. A bit like a Yamaha FB-01 with full front panel editing and a pretty good GUI. Just be careful about seconhand, becausesome of the year one versions can’t be updated (but even those would be great for FM drums and basic chip sounds).
TBH, my first synth was a TX802 I got as a teenager in the late 90s that started to have output problems (all 10 of the outs suddenly went so quiet that you can barely hear them over the noise floor with if you add about 60-70dB of gain, and it isn’t the transistors that are a known issue so it might be above my skill level to fix and out of my budget to send to someone that can - the headphone out is still fine, at least) but I finally found a free PSS-570 in the trash a couple weeks ago (one of my favrite toy keyboards of all time, I’ve had my eye out for a free one since 2011) and honestly it sounds better to me than any DX I’ve ever used. I also like the FB-01 better than any DX (except maybe the DX21, that chorus is nice) but I gave mine away to a friend three years ago when you could still find two or three of them under $50 every time you searched eBay.
I think I just prefer low end FM, especially 2 op. The TG-33 is the only “pro” FM synth I actually get much use out of anymore, even before the 802 started having trouble.
EDIT: MEGAfm looks great! A little expensive but not actually as expensive as I thought it would be when I saw the front panel. YM2612 is going to have that 9 bit DAC and low resolution operators like the other low-end FM synths I like, so if I was looking that would be the one I looked at first. Seems to be essentially two FB-01’s in a box with a bunch of hands-on control, and that sounds fantastic to me.
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@Supercolor_T-120 I did a comparison between the Mk.I which uses YM2612 and Mk.II YM3438 version of the MEGAfm in the MEGAfm thread which might be helpful.
My experience of the OT learning curve so far is that it will definitely stymie you at first when you try to do some basic things, but the more you repeat the same actions in different contexts the less mysterious it seems, and the fog soon clears. Maybe this is an obvious tip but I recommend not spending too much time with constructing a rigid live set at first, but keep trying stuff out, tearing it down and then rebuilding it.
Like because of the way I intend to use it for very improvised live stuff I’ve been constantly changing what tracks do, where they record from etc, and changing out FXs a lot rather than doing a lot of pattern creation and getting too invested in a particular set of samples. So because I keep tearing down and recreating and reimagining how I might use the OT I’m starting to get pretty fast at setting up a track to do something, much of the friction that gets in the way of making music just goes away and the flexibility and power of the device becomes a joy to experience.
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I’ll check it out, the only things I’m interested in getting any time in the next year or two is a Hydrasynth module and two iConnect mioXL interfaces (to replace all of the old, early 90s MOTU interfaces I use as routers and the early 00s one I use as an actual interface), but the money I’d saved so far is going to replace the wall in my basement studio I had to tear down last weekend because the people who built it put the ends of some drywall flush against an outer wall that gets damp a few times a year, and I spotted mold. Once drywall ahs any moisture on it the mold is unstoppable so I had to tear it out. There’s just a half-meter crawlspace behind it and the frame is fine, so I’m going to make some DIY acoustic panels and replace the wall with them, let the crawlspace be a big air gap between the panels and the outer concrete wall.
It was a really close call, that spot is the only damp part of the basement and we had more rain than usual ove rthe last two months; if I han’t caught when I did things would ahve gotten ugly fast when the warm weather hit!
The room was built for a graphic designer who lived here before me, this is what happens when you send a designer to do a carpenter’s job. It looks nice, but functionally it’s not that well thought out at all.