How much do you REALLY love the Octatrack?

For those of us who hate math, it’s a grand and intuitive instrument (that should probably have its own college course)

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It’s weird though, it helps to think of the math to understand what you can do, but you also don’t really have to think about it… I’ll think about it when programming…
When I’m jamming I’m definitely not thinking math and am just feeling the vibes and using the OT like an instrument…

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Basically it’s replicate the Beat Repeat from Ableton Live with Green Parameters. I don’t tell how i shape those parameters and on what materials but i use this in a weird way :slight_smile:

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Chance are managed with Trig Conditions and Variation with Part/Pattern/crossfader
Also i have a crazy routing for that between my OT mk2 and my Mixer.
And a LFO in the recreation.
I will enhance this with an Analog HEAT soon…

Also : it’s more of a self creative trick to heavily reduce habituation and tiredness when you compose locked in a groove for hours. if i can explain things the better way

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Merci!
Have you any video or something to listen to an exemple of that( not asking to see how you are doing that on OT, just wants to listen the results )
( and your ex-OP1 still on my hands :wink: )

By the way, I also love my OT mk1…It’s the base of my set-up for some projets. It take’s care of 4 tracks for samples, mixer for A4 an RYTM, one track for transitions and a master track that goes to HEAT for kind of live fx/mastering… Like a lot of guys by here, i would imagine…

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That is a great price. When I just looked, it was $29.50 US. Have I gone wrong?
EDIT: Just found the cyber monday button for a 75% discount. Thanks :):grinning:

I do not think it will serve a lot of people as it’s a very personal trick who work on me… Each time i start a session (before TRC on OT) i generate a new iteration of A TRK on 12 minutes and it’s never the same. it’s help me to not be bored each time i work on a track by surprising me because i discover THAT TRK generated with harnessed chaos and i can’t be bored because they usually something happen i didn’t know it will happen because i don’t made it, it’s generated.

of course the basics of THE TRK is the same for THE PRJ assciated with it it just ALIVE and i don’t have control over whether it goes in all directions or not? And it’s something i do for every track i working. And generate a new iteration each new session to make the track progress… it’s also keeping me in LIVE ALIVE by getting an amount of things where i do not have control and i have to deal with it. because sometimes it’s challenging. That way it’s usually a pleasure to play my tracks because i generate a new iteration before to LIVE and i discover it the moment of the venue.

i called it the Fordism-Trk.

Great to hear the OP1 is okay :wink:

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I am personally not a big fan of mine, I am much more comfortable with the mpc way of working, and much prefer the ability to assign sounds an play them and have an instrument feel than a clicky mental twister of a machine.
Looking at pairing it with another mpc ATM. The two together are a great pair.
Also I find it terrible to track into my daw, and I am finding that every ones answer to complaints about the octatrack are along the line of “oh you just have to conform to how it works” which I find odd.
Again , it’s good for loading pre made loops and working from those, and for pairing with other gear. But even the midi sequencer limitations are really weird and annoying to me.

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Imo, the octatrack to me is like a dr Rex and an effects unit type machine than an instrument. and an mpc is more like a real instrument and a great sequencer.

Thanks for that!

Indeed! :joy:

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Welcome. And I was wrong, not almost two hours, three hours 4 minutes.
Excellent deal.

@Open_Mike @Supercolor_T-120
When a longtime friend and musical collaborator suggested Octatrack to me three years ago I was put off by the price of the unit and didn’t really invest any time in reading forum chatter. Two years later I had my Ableton setup and had done a few gigs and sessions and was lukewarm on the results… flexibility was great, but i felt immediacy and stability were always questions…
So I looked into the OT vid’s, read the manual, and started reading the forum chatter, and quickly realized my buddy was right.
The MPC could do some of what I wanted, but the OT could offload all of what I wanted the laptop to do and offered some other mojo that, no shit, synergized my equipment into something greater than the sum of the parts.
This is why I love my OT.

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Just bought it. Wow 7$ is pretty cheap Jesus Christ. Cant wait to spend some time with this.

this thread has me thinking a lot more optimistically now about what the OT can do and makes me feel less claustrophobic which I know seems silly. Thanks again everyone for the amazing responses. Cant wait to look back on this thread and laugh.

So much OT love out there. WOW!

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Thanks for this. Im gonna try this cross fading idea. Need something like this to keep me occupied while I change beats on the Tempest.

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When you say programming which parts of the OT’s design are you referring to exactly…

There’s some real magic that happens when the beats of the previous song start to intermingle with the beats of the next song - especially in the hihats and percussive sounds. I usually mute/filter out the kick of the either the old pattern or the new pattern so you don’t get overlapping heavy kicks. However, sometimes the phasing and mixing of the kicks can accidentally sound cool during a song transition :smiley:

The best thing about OT is the happy accidents.

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Pretty much all of it besides playing music… Setting up trigs on tracks, plocking, slicing, making scenes, rearranging slice remixes, designing arps and lfos, pattern/part creation in general…
I’m loop/realtime sample based so my outcome always changes by what I sample. I don’t do anything involving creation of trigs or plocks or scenes or anything when jamming, I just use what I already have layed out as a jam station that takes my loops and samples in all directions…
Here I speak of this a little:

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For me, it really started to click me when I STOPPED using any loops at all.

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In a way I’m actually GLAD I took the plunge without reading much forum chatter, because all the talk of bugs might have scared me off. I’ve hardly encountered any at all, and none of them have been major.

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Another thing is that even though I’m into the OT, I totally understand the folks that don’t like it. It’s pretty odd, I love the way it works but I’m pretty odd myself…
I try to tell folks how to use it to do what they would like, but if they still don’t jive with the workflow I completely understand and there’s not much you can do about that except use another device, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s most definitely not for everyone…
It’s a super geeky device, not everyone wants to calculate music, but once you do you can definitely jam away…

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Yeah, I think Kyma or Kurzweil K2000/2500/2600 are really good comparisons here, insofar as all three are the sort of thing that will either make you totally reconfigure the technical side of your process an discover all kinds of new ways of working, or they’ll just not fit at all. Both are valid, but I have a hard time imagining beigng neutral on any of those machines, personally. I’ve known two people who went down the Kurzweil rabbit hole and it’s very similar to my experience with the Octatrack (and very different for what has happened with people I know who went Eurorack, which is just as transformative if it clicks, but is also a bottomless pit where the OT or a Kurzweil or something like that appeals because it’s more of a closed system with its own internal logic that still manages to create almost limitless complexity out of what is - compared to the modular or computer music worlds - a pretty simple, limited set of tools.

Eurorack an open ended computer based environment like Max/MSP or similar is like looking out into the universe, the Octatrack is like a fractal curve that contains an infinite amount of one dimensional space in a finite (and arbitrarily small) amount of two dimensional space.

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Agreed 100%. I stopped using loops, loaded up a bunch of single drum hits into the audio pool and got busy. Everything made a lot more sense to me when I did this. That process really pulled it all together for me. I highly recommemd this approach if you newer users are lost a bit and not feeling as if you are as productive as you had hoped.

I also love the Kurzweil approach and still own my K2000 I bought new close to 20 years ago.