How hard is it to use an Octatrack?

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#21

I think everyone else has pretty much nailed it.

“Subjective” is the word to keep in mind here. If you approach the OT slowly and compartmentalise in the early days you will sit wondering why the hell folks think it’s complicated. It’s only when you try to do everything at once that your mind begins to melt and the temptation to chuck the OT out the window comes.

I’ve found that in it’s own way, the OT is the closest an electronic instrument has come to the experience of learning a traditional musical instrument. If you bought a piano/guitar/whatever you wouldn’t expect to be belting out amazing, original material from the get go but you can get going with a few chords fairly quickly and over time get increasingly proficient. Years down the line you’ll still be learning. That’s the OT right there.

I’m on my 4th time owning one and I still haven’t touched parts in any way! Or decided if I prefer track 8 as a master or not. Or really used static and pickup machines in any capacity! Of all the years I’ve had one in my possession I’ve probably used less than a tenth of what it’s capable of! But that’s what I find fascinating. It’s been a long journey getting to the place I’m at now but I feel delighted that I’ve ended up back where I started (OT was my first “serious” music purchase years ago).

In short, all that the OT can do is it’s blessing and its curse. As long as you remember the KISS approach when feeling a little out of depth then you’ll be grand.

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#22

I don’t think the problem is the fact it is hard, more do you want to invest the required time, when precious time can be used elsewhere, more productively? This was my case anyway

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#23

I found the Octatrack massively easy to learn, the only thing that bummed me was the way the RAM deletes your unsaved recordings at power cycle.

#24

OH I think to something else because people make a big mistake too it’s learning without stepping out to practice. If you not practice like a lot in between, you end up with forgotten what you’ve learn… if the OT stays for weeks to take dust, you switch on and say how we do that ? damn I can’t remember… That’s sort of things doesn’t help at all.

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#25

Interesting. I understand that.

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#26

What you say about the OT being the closest thing to a actual musical instrument is exactly the way I feel about it. I played saxophone as a child and the OT really reminds of those days- Having to remember which button combinations to press to make the sound happen and the amount of actual practice it takes. Sometimes I sit down and play even when I don’t want to (actually once I do, I forget that I didn’t want to and end up having a bunch of fun), but do anyways, just to keep my mind fresh in the mix.

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#27

I strongly agree with you, I think that you need to take a couple of week to play around with the OT, learn how it works, learn how you can make it work for you and find out what it does that you wouldn’t even have though about!

And then practice what you’ve learned, because the next time you come to your OT with an idea in mind you don’t want to have to go through the manual, or find that youtube tutorial to remember how to transition between patterns, or how to sample internaly (yes, I speak from experience :slight_smile: ).

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#28

It feels hard at the beginning, especially crossfader with heels, more confortable after.
https://www.elektronauts.com/uploads/default/original/3X/4/b/4b2929e0c94df29b1776d37e9f9f35ada6b32c03.jpg

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#29

It can definitely launch rockets and order coffee at the same time!

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#30

Not hard at all.

Like any toolbox, open it up and each piece in there is pretty easy to grasp and use. The hammer, the saw, the whatnot and the other stuff.

But what are you gonna do with all these options? Build a chair, a bed, a toy for your kid, a house where you’ll spend the rest of your life? That’s up to you. And what tools to use, and when, and how, to get there - that’s also up to you.

That is hard. And that has nothing to do with the Octatrack.

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#31

EXACTLY

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#32

You nailed it IMHO.

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#33

parts is such a useful feature, get on that! Ive barely used pickup machines either though

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#34

Disclaimer - I JUST picked up my mk 2, and very much look forward to, uh, strugglng with an octatrack again.

I’ve used many an electronic instrument in my day, and am not a newcomer to Elektron gear.

I found the OT to be very difficult to learn, given that I didn’t use it every day or close to it, like some users. I found the menu locations of many of the functions to be rather unintuitive, and many of the keystroke combinations to also be unintuitive. I found the manual to be rather unhelpful in finding the answers to specific questions as to how to do this and that (which I find true of other elektron manuals also).

This was just my reaction to it, but I’ve also encountered this reaction from lots of people. I’m not so surprised to find such a positive consensus here, since this is primarily a forum for people who love Elektron gear.

In any case, I’m not a dumb guy, so I’m determined to find a way to conquer the Octatrack, mostly because I expect that it will be extremely useful in extending the use of sampled violin (I have an extended range electric which I use all the time), and also because I think that the midi sequencer is different enough from the other ones that I use that it adds a different dimension to my midi sequencing (though I wish that it had some of the features of some of the dedicated units).

In any case - this post is emphatically not intended to downplay people’s positive experiences with this. But the people who have raved about it personally to me tend to use it as the centerpiece of their music, while I likely will not, and am pretty nervous that I will struggle with it again. Another disclaimer - I really don’t have the greatest memory for things like menus, keystrokes, etc, and that obviously plays into my frustration.

I just wanted to post because it seemed like (at least from the beginning of the thread) that some of the negative experiences were downplayed as being from just a “handful” of users. I don’t believe that to be the case.

I’ll also comment that I just picked up the a4 mk 2 (I had used the original for awhile a few years ago) and I’m just struck by how brilliant a machine it is. But I do find the docs to be rather deficient in learning it. Almost everything you need to know is there SOMEWHERE, but often it’s spread out into several sections which don’t refer to one another, repeated mention if made of this menu and that without telling you how to get there (sure - there are pics in the beginning, but a little redundancy is GOOD in a manual), and I still haven’t found some info in the manual that I have stumbled on by trial and error.

in any case - hoping to dive into the ot this long weekend. Wish me luck!!

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#35

I think the implication was made above, but just to underscore the point - the OT gives back what you put into it. From the start I found value in it, even knowing I had hardly scratched the surface. I still have a lot to learn 5 years later, but it is tremendously capable for a variety of functions. The best thing to do is to focus on a specific goal with it and gradually build out from the original intended workflow.

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#36

If you take the tool analogy farther it works even better, because tools seem simple at first but as you get better at using them you go back and realize what you thought was simple is actually much more complex than you realized and you fin yourself returning to basics because you realized that, for example, if you’re ging to get a glass-smooth surface on the top of a guitar you’re making you’ll need to put in some serious weeks or months of practice on your sharpening. The guy who taught me the basics of luthierie once said that it takes about a year of practical experience (that is, practice, then application, then more practice with the things you learned when you were applying what you practiced last time, plus the very important but underappreciated TAKING REGULAR BREAKS TO LET YOUR BRAIN MAKE SENSE OF WHAT YOU LEARNED - that is really important, sometimes you have to just stop and do something else for a few weeks, but you almost always come back wiser than when you left, and that’s true of music too, or anything else really) just to learn how to properly set up a card scraper, which is about the simplest tool there is. But it turned out he was right.

The OT (or a traditional instrument, or the MPC, or all the different varieties of modular synthesis, or any number of production tools - think about how long it actually takes to really master compression - I mean really master it) is like that, the more you understand it the more you realize you have to learn. I’m not much of a sports person but it’s also a great example. I mean, how hard could it be to put a ball in a net, it’s the simplest thing in the world. And yet…

EDIT: we’re lucky with music, though, because unlike, say, being a machinist, for music technical mastery isn’t really the be-all-end-all goal, otherwise we’d all just be listening to recordings of drum clinics at Guitar Center or something. Technical mastery is a useful tool but it’s not what makes music good and it can even get in the way (ever tried playing with someone who has practiced a lot and can play really fast and precisely but can’t actually listen and adapt in the ways you need to to actually play music? It’s awful. You can have amazing technique and be a terrible musician).

So the other thing to keep in mind is that just because the OT can do a lot doesn’t mean you have to sue many of its features to make good music with it.

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#37

First off, let me say that I really love the Octatrack - it’s one of my favorite instruments and certainly my favorite sampler and my favorite piece of Elektron gear. However, I have to concur with many things in the above post. Like Droolmaster0, I don’t use the Octatrack as my main instrument, nor is it the center of my studio. Because of that, I also find that some things are not intuitive enough to remember from session to session - especially if I go weeks or months without turning it on. I freely admit that I bought the MkII simply for the added buttons. Any improvement to the UI is welcome. Having said that, I won’t ever be without one as long as it is available and working.

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#38

Yeah that’s a pretty good description, I’ve been saying it’s like a tracker and a VP9000 inside o an Electribe but this is even more accurate. The comparison with a tracker is key, though - almost all of the things about the OT’s sequencer that are unusual (and its limitations, too) make a lot more sense if you think of it as a tracker rather than a conventional step sequencer.

I think the manual itself is OK (not the best but decent), but the index is terrible.

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#39

Bought an Ocatrack in Dec 2015.

For the first 2-3 months, kept feeling like I’d bought the wrong device, couldn’t get the sound/workflow I was looking for.

Then I changed direction: used only the Octatrack, started to focus on a single feature at a time, put aside any ideas of creating a song/music. Suddenly, started to enjoy myself and importantly started to enjoy using the machine.

My expectations/previous experience had been stopping me from understanding it. Once I bent myself around the will of the Octatrack, a workflow emerged naturally.

Use it as a sampler, MIDI sequencer, mixer, FX unit(s)… Couldn’t be happier.

Is the Octatrack hard to use? Maybe, at first… depends upon experience/expectation. But, little by little, in its own sweet time, the Octatrack will find a place in your setup… then, after a few months, another place… and another place, and then it’ll find a place in your heart… Or it won’t and you sell it.

Remember, if you do sell: you’ll endlessly lament on these forums about how you shouldn’t have let it go and how you might just give it a another go.

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#40

I’m a well known octa hater around here, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I’m currently on my 3rd one, and still finding it a slog to use.

Right now I’m mostly using it as a glorified mixer & midi sequencer that I run my analog 4 and nord drum 3 into. I’ll probably sell it again in a couple of months and move towards using my rc505 looper more.

Meh, I don’t know. Some people love this bloody box, I find it a real workflow showstopper.