New Octa user + Bank/Pattern struggling

Hello all! I am now joining the Octa crew since about a month back and I spend as much time as I can on it under the conditions I have. Truly a wonderful piece of kit. Every now and then I encounter some parts of the work flow that I cannot really grasp.

Two questions:

  1. I have been working on a song and filled it up with variations and ideas in bank 1 by duplicating patterns across all the 16 trig keys. Now when I switch to bank 2 and wish do go on - it feels like some settings have changed. All the samples but one are there, the playback page is different - what else is different? The pattern sounds almost the same when switching on the slices in the playback setup for each track that had it this way - but for some reason my kicks are super low in volume and my bassline is not there any more. This is probably some rookie mistake but I thought most information was stored in parts+patterns and not banks.

  2. Lets say I am in the audio editior. I seem to be able to copy and paste to some extent, but I have not figured out how to extend the audios total lenght - Is there a way?

Bless!

  1. All the machine settings are saved to Parts: What machine is used at which track, what sample slot it plays and with which settings. There are 4 Parts per bank. Now, when you switch to a new bank, the Parts are different ones. Part 1 in bank A is not the same as Part 1 in bank B. You can use copy-paste to copy Part settings from one bank to another.

  2. Good question. I would be happy to know as well.

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Thanks a lot!
Oh not bad, that extends the capability of what one can achieve within one project. Ill have a go at it and hopefully it solves it, it sounds like duplicating the parts from bank 1 to bank 2 would do the trick.

google Merlin’s guide to octatrack

Welcome!

No, the ā€˜paste’ and ā€˜duplicate’ functions replace the data that is already there and so, to my knowledge, you cannot extend the length of a sample. One workaround might be to trigger two samples at the appropriate times and resample the output into a new sample.

Hey!

Regarding question #2, I wondered if there was a workaround, too. I once posted this question in here and got one response:

Maybe this might help you!

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Thanks for the tip. I have already read that one - but takes a while to get everything to stick to my memory I guess.

Maybe this might help you![/quote]
Cheers, that is indeed useful for some applications.

So everyone I have got a new question after working briefly with the arrangement.

  1. Is there a way to move around the playhead position so that I don’t have to listen from the start of the arrangement each time I add a new pattern and see how it transitions?

Use the [UP] and [DOWN] keys to move the two arrow indicators to the row you want to start from and press [ENTER/YES] or [PLAY] if the arrangement is not already playing. See page 107 of the manual.

[quote=ā€œā€œPeterHanesā€ā€]

Use the [UP] and [DOWN] keys to move the two arrow indicators to the row you want to start from and press [ENTER/YES] or [PLAY] if the arrangement is not already playing. See page 107 of the manual.[/quote]
Ah, wonderful thanks! Somehow I missed it (and been reading those pages over a few times).
I suppose there is not a way for the playhead to jump back to the selected row when stopping unless playing with the jump/skip commands?

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I would just temporarily put a JUMP command at the start of the arrangement, but other people might have some better ideas.

just a tip: you have four parts per bank and 16 scenes per part. there is an immense amount of variation right there within one bank. i don’t know if you explored the scene system already but after you do so you might find that you don’t even need another bank for your track. i personally use only one bank per track and i rarely even need all four parts.