This is how I envision the use of the OT. Next year, when prices drop some more for the MK1 
Hmm. Now that I think about it, the disadvantage would be that you had to follow the ot tempo right from the beginning, if you‘d want to bring in some other elements.
The great thing about the pickups is that the ot tempo follows your loop
It really depends on one’s specific needs and emergent workflow with loopers and particularly with the OT. Respectfully, I don’t agree with @GovernorSilver that if you don’t use flex machines on the OT, then you’re not getting your money’s worth from the OT. I save the OT RAM for pickups almost 100% of the time (I use a lot of static and neighbour machines in addition to pickups) and only very occasionally use flex. But everyone’s musical needs are different, so I understand those for whom flex machines are indispensable.
@drNate when you say “can then loop some further musical/rhythmic elements over the top . . . We want to keep the feeling quite organic and live.” Does that mean that you wan’t to ONLY live loop and don’t plan on using the OT’s sequencer? If so, I’d say there are probably better multi-track loopers for your needs. I mention this because the sequencer as a whole and how all the machines interact with it is really the main thing that that sets the OT apart from other advanced loopers.
And it does make a great effects box too 
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Ot can be slave, especially if you don’t record with it. OT worked well with Rc 505 for me. Rc 505 was slaved, and I always record with defined tempo. Rc 202 has almost the same possibilities with 2 tracks instead of 2. For home recording I prefer to use Ot only for the moment to avoid quality loss.
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Fair enough.
It’s really up to the OT owner whether or not the OT is delivering his/her money’s worth. If you want to use just the pickup machines (assuming the slave pickup machine bug(s) are gone) and chain some FX and are happy with the sounds- without using flex machines, that’s all that matters.
To me, flex is what elevates the OT to another level but again, that’s just my take.
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It can be a super amazing looper but it wants you to look at it and operate it more than other loopers if you want to use it to its full potential. You can use it as a regular looper with a foot pedal, but if you really just want loops without thinking too much and using your feet, there’s probably better options…
If you end up using it you’ll probably want to stop playing your instrument and turn to the OT and play it a lot more than you would with a normal looper, but the stuff that you can do when you turn to it will be far more than what a looper would do. Using the OT I’ve become more of a crossbreed between traditional instrumentalist and electronic artist, I don’t play an instrument all the way through a song, I go back and forth…
With all the other stuff it can do comes learning how to use it, which is a lot more complex than a looper, and takes some time. It’s very rewarding what you can do with live audio once you get the hang of it, but again thats usually operating the OT from the unit, although I’m sure you could map some tricks to a foot controller or a controller clipped to a mic stand or something…
-flex capabilities-
You can use your pickup loops on flex tracks and not take up any more memory…
For example a pickup on track one and recorder buffer 1 loaded to multiple flex tracks slice/diced/etc… doesn’t take any more memory than just the pickup loop…
So basically all the flex tricks can be done with the sampled pickup material…
I often have about four pickup loops going ranging from around 8 seconds to up to around a minute, multiple sliced and flex warped remixes of the loops, a few samples loaded, and still half my memory free at 24 bit…
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Yes that would be an issue for us, we want the machines to follow our lead, not the other way round. So our initial loop will set the tempo, with subsequent loops quantised to it. That could be tricky to set up with an external looper…
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We want to build up and manipulate loops taken from our instruments, it would be good if these could be quantised but different lengths. With the loops running it would free up one of us to play effects - riding delay etc to dub out and otherwise effect elements of the loops. I’m not sure whether the sequencer would come into play here - maybe adding some sequenced effects? We are trying to stay away from really obvious sequenced beats to keep things organic, but maybe some live sequencing of captured sounds.
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That sounds close to what we want to achieve. Do you have any videos posted? I would be really interested to see a performance. Also, any pointers for getting going? We would want at least two instruments hooked up for looping. Do you use a mixer or straight to Octatrack?
[quote=“drNate, post:14, topic:47123”]So our initial loop will set the tempo…That could be tricky to set up with an external looper…
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If there is midi sync, I don’t know why it would be tricky. Even simplier !
I guess rather than tricky, more spendy then. I would hope the Octatrack would manage the looping for us, poss with a midi footswitch which I have already. But maybe we should look at a looper with midi sync if this was a better option.
Ot can do it, but it is not immediate. It’s the best looper if you want real time mangling, 8 stereo, tracks, multi fx…but maybe the worst for immediacy and simplicity.
That said, I sold my loopers and kept Octatrack only!
What is your midi foot controller?
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As of yet I don’t have any videos, but I would like to start a live improv jam series on YouTube at some point, hopefully this winter. I’m entertaining the idea of making instructional videos, but I don’t know, we’ll see…
I do use a mixer before the OT, the mackie vlz4’s have a nice alternative bus feature where you press a button on a channel, and it reroutes from the mixers mains to the alt bus which I have sent an OT input pair. If your only using two instruments then you might not need one, but you need a way to convert the signal to line level before the OT.
As @sezare56 said the OT is the best and the worst looper. I love what it does and wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it’s odd at first and definitely requires a lot more effort to learn than a simple looper…
As for loops of different lengths, I tend to stick with loops in multiples of 4 bars, 4,8,16,32…
The pickups work great for this, I don’t have much experience running loops of different step lengths and not sure how the pickups behave. I have experienced the OT switching tempo after recording a second loop that wasn’t a multiple length of the first one, as its way of “syncing” it perhaps. There’s a lot of settings though, it’s very possible I just needed to change them, and I didn’t look into it. Perhaps @tanburi might have some insight on this?
As for tips honestly my best one would be to download the manual before you even buy one and give it a read, it will give you an idea of the complexity that you would be dealing with compared to a simple looper and should give you a better idea of whether you want to dive in or not…
Cheers…
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I have since traded my OT for a Rytm, but I often used it this way. I never ended up using a midi foot controller as I had initially planned, but I can certainly see the benefit of that approach, particularly for pickup machines. The OT is a truly wonderful machine, but it will require patience and dedication to use it fluidly. I think it really comes down to the complexity you’re trying to achieve. If you just want to build up some static loops and play over them, jam, etc. there are better machines for this, with more immediacy and simpler interfaces. If you want tons of control over those loops, huge potential for transitions and warping, a deep workflow with crazy options for sound design, the OT would probably be a great choice.
Basically, if your looping plans are more simple and straightforward, I’d suggest a looper that is simple and straightforward. If you want to take it further with lots of room to grow, the OT is it. If you scroll down a bit on my Instagram page, you’ll find a few videos I made, mostly looping live with pickup machines. This was one of my favorite approaches with the OT, but it’s just a small segment of what the machine is capable of. The relevant posts were all put up in January of this year. I hope this helps in some way.
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In the back of my mind I’ve known for quite some time I’m going to want a foot controller to play out live…
I want to get a full on fully customizable unit that not only maps to the pickups but also has an expression pedal and presets so I can toggle through setups and control all sorts of OT features while playing…
I’ll have a preset just for extended guitar playing that has the toggles and expression mapped to the fx. I’ll have a preset set up for mixing with the pedal assigned to the crossfader and the toggle buttons assigned to amp vol for mutes with fx tails… And more setups for various uses… Pattern control, etc…
I’ll try to keep several of the most used functions similar across presets so the preset is always geared toward one thing but doesn’t leave me out of control of things I need to use a lot…
I think if did this I’d be super stoked!
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Hi there. FWIW, I spent a long time setting up my behringer FCB1010 to work with the OT to use it as a looper for my guitar, and compared that with a hybrid setup (Ableton looper controlled by the behringer) and I concluded the Ableton setup was a lot more useful and simpler to use, whilst the OT was best for the usual sample trickery. I had them midi clocked to each other, and it worked smoothly
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Thanks for the input…
I can see that being an amazing setup but I don’t use ableton and have been looping and mangling with the OT for a few years now, got the workflow down just want to have access to the functions with my feet…
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Live looping is what got me here with the 'nauts, Elektron, and the OT.
I went through several iterations of my looping setup before coming to the conclusion that OT is the way to go.
I wanted control of multiple loops, transport control, ability to control other devices, and effects at the tip of a drumstick. OT does this for me… where everyone else is using a foot controller, my feet are busy behind the drum kit, so I use a Roland SPDSX or a Yamaha DTXM12 as my midi controller.
I initially started with Ableton/interface/laptop, which works great but I didn’t want a laptop on stage.
Next was EHX 45000; great though simple looper, let’s you reverse tracks on the fly, also good midi implementation, but no effects.
The Roland mc505 looks cool, but I passed on it after reading the manual, midi implementation isn’t enough for me.
Ditto - no, I’d have to mod the foot switch to work with a drum trigger or something, but no midi implementation at all.
T. C. Electronic VocalLive seems interesting, but built to work around that touch screen, so the midi implementation wasn’t up to par for my use.
After trying many loopers, it was either go with Ableton or Mobius or Mainstage all which work, but I decided on OT. I’m glad I did.
Thus far it works as I want it to, sometimes I get two PUM’s fighting for control over who is master, but this is happens about 1/5 times. Even then, it’s usually not a big deal for me to work around that.
I think what you’re wanting to do is perfect for the OT. It’s deep, but take it one function at a time, master that, and then master another function. In no time you’ll have what you need for your show mastered.
The possibilities for taking what you can create with a few instruments organically on the fly to hardly recognizable soundscape is this even music anymore how does that sound like an angry electric duck dub galactic mushroom trip is something no other looper I’ve tried can do.
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Maybe you missed the major V2 update, and the supplementary manual. Added midi assignments and targets.
I still don’t feel confortable with Pickups.
I like to use several Flex for realtime recording /mangling but I have to change parts with pattern to stop recording. If I use one shots I have no monitoring. I wan’t to record several tracks but I need Cue, which I’d like to keep for external Fx…
Yeah, coming out :
I still don’t have a real workflow. 
The OT works how I saw this work in my mind.
pad1 - Next track
pad2 - Previous Track
pad3 - A/B
pad4 - C/D
pad5 - Start Sync playback (toggle) Stop
And I’m controlling OT & PUM’s with one drumstick.
I’m looking forward to trying the FM pre-sliced buffer trick when I get home from tour and have all my gear, seems like that may fit a couple of things I want to try better than PUM’s alone.
@sezare56 I did miss that update, but OT is it for me. Best gear purchase I’ve made in some time.