How do you guys record the Octatrack?

as above or a Syntakt has been looking like a great couch buddy to me.

A Zoom h4n shouldn’t cost that much these days and is still a perfectly good recorder (that won’t get sticky like the h5, although that’s also a good one other than the stickiness problem). Triple duty as your OT recorder, field recorder for sample material and a simple USB audio interface if you need something smaller than your main interface for travel or whatever.

Tascam DR40x

That’s such a simple and smart idea. So basically you have 7 tracks and use 8 to capture the take with?

You could do track by track takes this way as well possibly if you selected the output from just one track and scene/fader jammed over it while the other tracks played as background. I may be wrong there.

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you can have 8 tracks and use any track to record. It records into that tracks buffer, you don’t have to keep that track free from playing back something

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Makes sense. Then you just go in and save the sample and it’s done.

I really am surprised I never tried this. Lol. It makes way too much sense and quickly captures all kinds of jamming and scene changes either per track or out of the master.

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Good call, i’ve got a Zoom h1n. But part of the problem is that you have to perform a song rather flawlessly.

hehe the way I see it thats whats being a musician is all about ;-)!

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True. very true. Just need to get better. Ordered a flightcase to make a cool creative hub I can move around. TBF the MPC looks just like a limited Ableton in that sense. Figure I’d feel like i’d rather get behind the big screen then

Tnx all! And recording into the OT itself is quite smart, I never knew the recording buffer was that long.

I‘m using the Zoom F3. It‘s small and portable with excellent preamps.

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The 8 buffers share RAM, up to 8m28s. You can record 8 tracks simultaneously, up to 1m03s per track.

You can use several buffers linearly, with several patterns, in order to record a specific length without having to stop it. (64+64 steps for instance).

You can define a recording length with Reserve Length (unit = seconds, not precise, but you can see corresponding length in steps).

A recording buffer can record itself : you can playback a recording on a track, and record it with the same recording buffer.

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Easy to edit an OT recording on a DAW grid. Beware of tempo with decimals : not precise values.
The Untold Truth About Octatrack Tempo

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Good to know. Thank you. I avoid decimals because of stuff like this.

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Needed if you want to tune well retrigs, 103.1(25) is A tuning for instance.

Before I realised tempo with decimals could be wrong, I had audio editing problems in a DAW. Now it is much better !

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I didn’t know about this decimal tempo phenomenon! Sometimes I end up with decimals in my tempo if I’ve been syncing with MIDI and then later change to use the internal clock and forget to check the tempo… I find it pretty frustrating sometimes because I do a lot of loop sampling on the OT. This is really good info

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I send output from my Octatrack to mixer recorder and record to an SD Card. Works perfect and super fast. Then edit in DAW. Or if I am using a DAW, send outs from Octatrack to my audio interface to record to a DAW. On my other Elektrons and my Virus, I like the Overbridge and Virus TI plugins a lot since they have tons of cool features.

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Best to keep the OT master then I guess… when using DT as master the tempo always junps around. Or is it better to just not share clock via midi, just program changes and keep the tempo the same manually

Yes, the audio recorder have to be master generally. Less variations, easier to edit audio on a grid, slice a loop.

But I tested OT slaved by Syntakt, it was very steady (sending only clock). If you send a lot of midi data with clock it is worse.

just saw this; also a nice way to record OT

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