I’m new to octatrack - got it mostly to make it a “gear heart” in my duo. My main goal for now is to create beats on this machine and to combine them with recorded pads from external synths. So the question is: if I’ll create an beat arrangment for a full song (already figured out how to) can I then record, for example, full bass part for the track directly to octatrack, simultaniously playing external synth while the beat is palying? Or should I use a computer insted to prepare all backing tracks and then load them into octa?And how to sync to the beat the best way in this case?
the RAM recording memory wouldn’t be big enough to directly record a whole track. I would record it into the computer to make life simpler, then import it. there might be a hack to route outputs->inputs and record to the CF card rather than RAM, but I’m not sure of how one might do that. Except for resampling internal sequences, I don’t really record directly to the OT. It’s just a bit more straightforward to record to the computer, edit the sample, and then transfer it to the OT.
You can get 8+ minutes of recording time onto one track by adjusting the memory allocation to the recorders. I do it so infrequently I forget where, it’s in the system menu somewhere under memory iirc.
Both were recorded straight into the OT and the final product was then recorded onto a computer for uploading to Youtube, and I think some limiting was also applied in Audition but otherwise they’re two live overdubs sampled into the OT
Ok, guys, I found that using a computer will make my life much easier) The only thing I can’t understand yet is conceptual: well, I made a beat arrangment on octatrack, recorded it on computer into DAW - so I have a reference to record other parts, prepared files to start right at the beginning of the attack of soundwave, but how to assigh in to octatrack beat after transferring? Guess it must be simple - just to allow the track with bass or pad part to play till the end…
depends how much control you want to have once you have the audio in the OT. if you simply want to play back a 5 min recording of a bass part, you would load that sample into a static machine, and then probably trigger it manually or with a one-shot trig, so it wouldn’t go back to the beginning when the sequencer loops.
a more powerful approach would be to make loops out of the bass part and sequence them with the OT.
yea, you could set a trig for one shot playback. or, if you have the bass part composed in the OT along with the beat, you could use the arranger to link sequences together so it all works together as a continuous backing track.
And like the rest of us you’ll probably find that once you have a track in the box, you’ll slice and chop and screw and mutilate until it sounds like something else altogether and wonder how you ever settled for just a bassline…
exactly summs up the danger and the beauty of the OT
If you just want backing tracks, theres not really any point using a sampler, especially the octatrack
but even with un-cut-up samples you could still do a lot of damage with scenes assigned to different fx etc
however in using one shot long static samples beware of using any pitch control, cos this will offset your samples and make them out of time