Lack of Individual Outputs or Overbridge on OT

I have to say that I find the OT’s sequencer to be a lot less capable than the sequencers in the DAWs that I use.

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I have to say DAWs are extremely boring. :slight_smile:

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No they’re not

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Two words: Trig conditions. On the OT, that is a game changer and the main reason for me to buy it.

I have to admit that mouse based DAW compostion or playing Push as an instrument has its merits, but the Elektrons really shine as sequencers.

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It’s funny, I’m the opposite. The longer I work in hardware the more I consider the AD/DA of digital gear part of its sound. I would ALWAYS take a little bit of added noise, converter jitter and all of the nonlinearities of the analog paths over a pristine digital transfer. In fact, over the last couple of years I’ve found myself not even using multiple outputs when they’re available, because the often dodgy internal summing of a piece of gear is part of its personality and almost always sounds better to me. I’ve had an MPC2000xl with the 8 output expansion since 2009 and I haven’t used anything but the main outs for the last 5 years because it never sounded as good. Got my current interface in 2011 and I have literally never hooked up the digital i/o once. Most of my hardware is from the ate 80s to the early 2000s so almost everything has between 4 and 10 direct outs and yet I almost never use anything but the stereo outs anymore. Back when I was just out of college i the mid 2000s, working at a used record shop, we had a big poster on the wall that had that famous john peel quote in big, block letters: “Listen, mate, life has surface noise.”

The irony is that I wrote off the Octatrack for years because I felt like it didn’t have enough i/o for its price point.

Everyone’s got a different way of working, though, and I totally get why for some people Overbridge (or some other form of direct track outputs) would be absolutely crucial, but to me after actually using the OT a lot for about a year and a half now it seems completely superfluous. The OT isn’t a DAW-in-a-box, it’s a standalone instrument. You can definitely create a finished production in it but I’d say that’s more a solo instrumental performance like a guitarist or an MPC artist than it is production in the studio sense. Instrumental performance and studio production are related and can overlap, but they’re ultimately different disciplines - equally valid, but different. It seems like there has always been a lot of misunderstanding about what the Octatrack is in this regard, and a lot of people are still expecting “live in a box” (it isn’t) or "the world’s greatest sampler (it isn’t) or “the worlds greatest sequencer” (not even close), when the reality is it’s an Octatrack and that’s what makes it so good.

I know none of this is any kind of new insight or anything, and I’m not really directing it at the OP or anyone else in this thread specifically. I’ve jsut noticed that with the release of the MK II and the renewed wave of interest in the OT there are a lot of people who are considering or even buying one without having been really given a good explanation of what it really is (I was one of them myself, there’s no shame in that - there’s a lot of misleading information about what to expect from an OT floating around on line, even more than for most instruments, and even though I did a lot of homework before I finally got one it turned out to be very different from what I expected and the ways I’ve ended up using it are completely different from what I got it to do. The feature that ended up selling me on it was pickup machines and I stopped using them entirely within a few weeks of getting it because it turned out that using the OT as a looper wasn’t as inspiring as using the OT as an OT.

Anyway, pardon the rambling, it’s just something that’s been on my mind this week.

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This is insightful, I think. Would love to hear your summary of what the OT ‘really is’.

This is the way I feel 100%. Plus I’ve gotten a lot better at mixing… I mix as best as I can, then perform live & record the master outs.

Having fun & enjoying the process is more important to me then a polished mix. Not only that… my passion, fun & feeling gets fused in the music… which I think is better.

I understand some people want both…understandably so…they want to infuse their music with their passion AND get a perfect mix… but sometimes this isn’t possible.

So my suggestion is focus on mixing… do things to the sounds prior to sampling into the OT (ie: eq, filter, pan, whatever, not sure what you have to make this possible, like a mixer) & then mix inside the box as best as you can. Record the master outs while playing live. If it’s a good track, I think being less polished makes it sound even better to be honest. It’s like “this track is THIS amazing & it’s not even perfectly mixed & mastered!” “WOW!!!” & it gives it an edge :sunglasses: Sounds raw.

An 8 Track Dynamic Performance Sampler ? :thinking:

LOOPER DEVICE
RADICAL SOUND PROCESSOR
BACKING TRACK MACHINE
LIVE SETUP HUB
REMIX TOOL
EFFECTS UNIT EXTRAORDINAIRE
PAPER WEIGHT
DUMBBELL
DAW
FLIP FLOP

No it is not. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Conditional trigs allow 64 step patterns to sound less repetitive.

In DAWs patterns can have any length plus you can have multiple patterns playing at the same time so conditional trigs are not really necessary, however DAWs do provide various random play options as well.

I have 5 different hardware sequencers (Yamaha, Korg, Roland and Elektron) and they are all fine in their own respective ways but IMHO none of them come close to the power and ease of use of a software sequencer.

I use my hardware sequencers only when I do not want to use a computer.

Me too ! All the time then. :slight_smile:

I think Octatrack combined with a linear sequencer like Mpc can be really efficient.
I don’t even talk about Cirklon.
Ram Record length is quite limited.

For the me most interesting things are TRC % / PRE / NEI conditions, combined with random lfos and up to 240 parameters linked to scenes. With Arranger or chained patterns, it is not limited to 64 steps.
Different scales per track, Plays Free Tracks…

Any DAW doing that easily? :thinking:

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I love my DAWs. The flexibility can’t be beaten by one hardware box. But I have not (yet) found what the Elektron sequencers can do with trig conditions in software. I do use them to make 4bar patterns less repetitive, but my main application is to use them for composition, combining logical conditions and probabilities with sample trigs as a form of generative music.

The closest I come for this is setting up Reaktor Ensembles, but it’s a pain when compared with the ease in the Octatrack.

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Managed to read over the OT manual part that mentions pattern chaining. This seems to be much easier than on the Rytm. Many thanks for mentioning pattern chains, I totally would have overlooked this great feature.

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Same here. That’s why driving VSTs and Drum Racks in Ableton Live with OT’s MIDI sequencer is my main combo. Best of both worlds and still just hands on enough.

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That is absolutely true, the sooner people realise this the better for them, I’m no fan of DAWs, I don’t use one and never plan to again, but their power can’t really be disputed. However a collection of hardware boxes can be a viable alternative, and if you are prepared to put the work in learning the instruments inside out, and maintaining good mixing and production then excellent quality productions are possible with hardware, just as with a DAW.

Personally I think going the all hardware route is a more difficult path to follow, but I’m also a firm believer - that for me at least - it is ultimately a more rewarding path, although I’d never suggest that it is more or less valid, at the end of the day the music that is created is the most important thing and the enjoyment gained from making it and listening to it, who cares how it was made?

The few areas where DAWs still have the upper hand over hardware is working with long audio files, mixing, and fx, but lately it seems to me that the hardware is catching up, exciting times!

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Sound generation too. The possibilities of sound design in a synth like Zebra or Avenger are incredible. And Bitwigs Modulation System makes it an instrument on its own, impossible to put this in hardware.

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Quite possibly, I’m not very up to date with the latest stuff, I don’t know how some of the newer digital eurorack stuff and things like Organelle or that new hardware granular synth stand up against cutting edge software instruments, but with layering and feeding things into other things the sound design possibilities of hardware are quite sufficient to keep my head spinning :wink:

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Wanting to go deeper in Octatrack management : OctaEdit.
Overbridge is not possible for hardware reasons.
Record in OT. Use your wav files in your DAW.

It does really depend on who you are. I’m not a fan of sound creation in the box but find mixing very satisfying and ultimately very rewarding.

It took me going from entirely ITB to entirely OOTB to figure out I was happy somewhere in the middle. And that’s why there are so many of these types of threads, everyone has to go through this journey of realising the limitations they embrace and which they reject.

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Ableton Live’s Clip Follow Actions are extremely powerful, offering both probability of event occurrence and randomisation of events.

A clip can contain a MIDI sequence or Audio, which can be looped or one shot.

Follow Actions are fairly easy to set up, obviously dependant on the extent of complexity you wish to employ.

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Good tip. Have not used them in this way yet.