Most complicated thing about OT?

Hi,
I’ve Ive currently got a DT and DN and thinking of making the leap and getting an OT.
I’ve been starting to go through the manual to try get an idea of how it works.
I haven’t finished it yet but so far it seems fairly straightforward eg parts etc make a lot of sense.
What did you find was the most complicated thing to wrap your head around? I’d like to find out those things to see if there’s anything that is perhaps not explained in manual that might put me off getting one :stuck_out_tongue:

Cheers

1 Like

Have a look at the pickup machine chart :joy:

16 Likes

The trickiest thing about the OT is actually the troubleshooting. Unlike the DT and DN there’s a lot of things that you can do pretty much by accident on the OT. and unlike the DT and DN the error messages you get or sometimes don’t get aren’t particularly helpful to what you’re trying to do. Hence 3/4 of the threads on here.

13 Likes

For me it has been just remembering where things reside in the vast labyrinth of settings and setups. A lot of times you go months without interacting with certain sections.

Audio editor settings, slice settings, trim settings, edit settings, record setup, playback setup, remembering I have to be in record setup to lay the one shot recorder trig I need, not hearing my track trigs and having to find the setting in MIDI/Control/AudioNoteOut was turned off for internal.

Sometimes I fire the thing up and it makes no sound, and it’s just that i have the crossfader faded over for my transition looper with no loop in the buffer.

2Cq

Go 6 months without actually recording anything from the inputs and then see if you can just hit the ground running some day when you just want to record a synth phrase.

18 Likes

Yeah, same for me.

I actually have notes for stuff like button combinations, lfo speed, delay times, envelope behaviour, trig conditions etc., but for example I used the OT as midi sequencer only for more than half a year and then I wanted to mangle some drums, I wasn´t so sure anymore how slide trigs worked^^
Do I have to place the slide trig on the start trig or on the trig I want to slide in? On both?
Stuff like that…

5 Likes

The more people say it’s complicated, the more I want to see what it can do…

5 Likes

When you mix MIDI send + THRU track + sampling + REC buffer mangling + Scenes, you start to have many places with potential hazard.

My own least favorite feature: default ON on time-stretch.

Love this machine though ^^

2 Likes

Thanks for the replies :slight_smile: it sounds like I’ll need to try it myself to see where the pain points are as each person will maybe have particular areas they find difficult.

Do you ever feel like you’re using it to its fullest potential?
Does it always feel like youre chasing something or wishing it was more intuitive or does the complexity “make sense”?

Does it ever feel like OT is trying to do too much?

I don’t mind complexity when it’s required but I’m cautious of unnecessarily complicated workflows. I am aware that if you want to do a lot with a limited control interface then things are gonna have to be somewhat complicated! Im assuming MK2 has improved some of that with extra buttons etc

Most options make sense if you are actively using them. The problem comes when you come back to it after some time away. Another source of confusion is the multiple layers of settings which can effect the machine state. My biggest frustrations are usually some form of “no sound is coming out of track x - why?” An easy example is when scene settings have priority over something you are trying to do - if you do not realize you have a particular scene active it can be confusing as to why the machine is not acting they way you expect it to. But there are many other ways this can occur. I believe I have a few saved projects copies that I’ve kept solely to one day try to figure out why something doesn’t work as expected (ie. I gave up!)

3 Likes

SAME!

Notes are crucial.

No, because it successfully does all those things. And I’d rather have one box that can wear 6 hats, than juggle 6 boxes.

It can feel like too much to handle early on, or when it’s been a few months since using it (or using a specific feature of it).
It’s a muscle, you’ve got to exercise it, and the more you do, the more you get out of it.

Also, the smorgasbord of capabilities makes for some happy accidents and creative opportunities.
Like slowing down the rate of a time stretched sample to get a completely different triplet swing groove out of it that you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. I rarely use timestretch, or the rate knob, and yet here I have found a creative use for them both.

2 Likes

I think it is always good to remind potential users that it can also be just one simple thing - most commonly a really nice drum machine. Everything else can be used when you are ready or … never. Luckily I think most of the complications do not get in the way of its most common use case.

4 Likes

The fact that the recorders aren’t tied to the track where you access them was really unsettling at first.

Like: you can have recorder 5 resampling track 1, and the recording being played by track 8.

OT demands some rigor at first, if you don’t want to shoot yourself in the leg later in the project.

And there’s the dreaded “why does it make no fucking sound?”. Once, I just enabled dynamic recording mid project, and bam, no sound. Impossible to discover why. A simple machine reboot brought back the sound, but I still don’t really know the answer.

6 Likes

I think getting the Transition Trick down early is a really good way to appreciate the complexity and power of the OT as it covers lots of bases.

When I recently got the OT (second time around) this was the first task I tried to nail. So useful and gets your brain into the OT universe.

2 Likes

With OT, the most complicated is to make simple things.

8 Likes

Co signed.

I don’t find anything particularly complicated but deciding on the way to use it for a particular task can require a bit of pre-planning and sometimes revision.

Even after years of owning I still find new ways or ideas with it, the gift that keeps on giving.

4 Likes

Haha this one freaked me out a couple of times as well :rofl:

3 Likes

For me it just the act of saving a project and loading it up again with everything sounding different. I tried to figure it out but after awhile it just wasn’t worth it.

4 Likes

Eh? Can you elaborate?

Answers in bold.

6 Likes

It’s just basically what others have said above. When you’re jamming on something and think you saved it, then come back to it a month later due to all the complexities in the machine things don’t sound the same.

2 Likes