Are there any good interviews with the octatrack tech team about their ideas, experiments and implementation choices?
Like a lot of people I find the octatrack musically fascinating, but also, er… intellectually nourishing. It reminds me a little of the ancient boardgame Go: a small number of simple rules, as a starting point, can create a vast complex and unfathomable playground. I find myself thinking about it walking down the street and wanting to talk to people about it, how a design choice creates an unexpected workflow or happy accident.
I’d really like to read more of what the octatrack designers and engineers in elektron were thinking when they created it but I can’t find much.
Does anyone have any links to interviews or articles?
As a window into the kind of introspection I’m after, the text below is from the manual. It’s the closest I can find to this kind of content. And it’s excellent:
"The first relatively affordable samplers were released in the 1980’s and made a huge impact on the music scene of that time. Sonic elements, taken from completely new sources, could suddenly form a vital part of a composition. This resulted in the birth and evolution of several genres, for example hip hop. The concept of the sampler has since then branched off in several directions. Software based samplers are today capa- ble of handling enormously large, multi-sampled, sample libraries. Hardware samplers aren’t really suited for those tasks. Instead, they come to their best when conceived as dedicated devices focusing on new and radical approaches to sampling.
"When we developed the Machinedrum UW, one of the goals was to allow for a creative use of samples. Once the machine was released it became apparent that especially the RAM machines, which made it pos- sible to record sounds in real-time and instantly play them back, were utilized in ways we originally couldn’t even imagine. Users around the world used them to incorporate live sampled shortwave radio sounds in their compositions, make instant remixes of 12” records and to more or less conceive new genres of music. It was obvious that the RAM machine concept harbored a tremendous potential. This was the starting point of the Octatrack. We wanted to create a machine that would regard recorded material not as inflexible sounds, but rather as something highly malleable. This is one of the reasons why the Octatrack exists. The other one is because of the stage. The laptop computer has quickly established itself as a common instru- ment in live setups. It is a powerful and highly customizable tool, however, the multi functionality is at the same time a disadvantage. When it comes to audio related tasks a laptop is still a jack of all trades but mas- ter of none. The Octatrack on the other hand is designed to be a streamlined, reliable and straightforward machine allowing live performers to really add something extra to their sets. It can act as a backing track machine, a second turntable, a source of experimental soundscapes or simply as an instrument encourag- ing improvisation and fun.
“These two reasons converge and form the ultimate raison d’être of the Octatrack: its capability to re-estab- lish sampling as an art form. We hope it will be a trusty companion during your musical endeavours.”