The reason I held on to the Octatrack for so long was also the reason I eventually sold it.
For me, the Octatrack was a one stop solution for producing full tracks with any kind of material that I could get my hands on - my own, or others. I could just pour it into the Octatrack and build a track with it, like you would in a DAW (which I don’t use), only oriented much more towards a looper.
It’s not hard to build a track within the Octatrack. But it’s not entirely easy either, because you need to adhere to structures within the instrument that sometimes makes total sense, sometimes not, depending on what you want to do.
And whenever you wanted to build longer linear stuff, it just got trickier. Which is fine. The Octatrack never gives the impression that it’s designed for that. But given that you don’t have to bend its circuits to get there, just scratch them sideways a little, it’s an easy reach.
What I felt was that this is as close to a DAW in a hardware box that I could come, today. Earlier attempts from primarily Roland were interesting, but ultimately just beasts of burden compared to proper DAWs.
But I also felt that it shouldn’t be this hard to just want to record stuff, shift it around some, try out a few ideas and see what happens, if you want to break from the structure of the Octatrack. There is a grid there, there is an idea of a pattern being 64 steps, there are ways to go outside this, but still - there’s a basic paradigm that you need to understand, master and then learn how to break.
But traditionally, music doesn’t work like that. Even an improvised jam from Miles Davis or Dataline, is still a completely linear piece. It begins somewhere and ends somewhere else. The functional idea of putting stuff together in loops and patterns is a practical solution to build music that’s based on recycling and repeating, with variations and drops and transitions. But it’s still an engineered solution. The equivalent in classical music is the Reprise marker in sheet music, the structural requirement that a sonata should always repeat its sections twice, that a theme is presented in the beginning and the elaborated on in the final section. And so on.
I’d really like to see a hardware piece that just lets me work with music, like I can work with it when I write sheet music. To pour stuff into it, to let me move it around freely, to build the puzzle - but then add the Elektron magic to it, that which far supersedes traditional composing and even the workflow of a DAW.
Just picture Mozart by his piano as he’s working late hours, scribbling away, lights still burning - and put Elektron’s new recording device there, right next to him, within reach. Engineer his pen into a modern hardware instrument.
