New to Octatrack - live questions

Elektron Gear Octatrack
1

Hi,
I just got the Octatrack, after falling in love with the Rytm and the A4.
My hope is to use it to replace Ableton for when we’re touring. So here’s a few questions regarding techniques. We are normaly booked to play 1 to 2 hours live sets, no pause in between tracks / like a DJset of our stuff.:

  • I see from the manual that you can fit 256 samples in your project (half on the Flex and half on the Static) - and our Ableton liveset contains quite a bit more than 256 samples. Is there a workaround? (I was thinking that maybe rather than splitting our tracks up into 8 bar loops I could insert the whole track (like the whole bass track for instance) and just trigger the different sections of it - which would make it like 1 sample instead of maybe 8 per. song)

  • Transition - I’ve seen the x-fader trick and the other one one youtube (where he use parts and an infinite loop or something quite like that) - is there any other ways you know to transition between songs? (Ableton clip launch style…)

  • Settings: I’ve had this issue with the A4 - I play my liveset, and tweak out all parameters during the live set. Pack everything down, get to the next gig, and when I open my liveset the parameters are saved in the state they last were (because of the way the Elektron machines do the saving) - Is there a way to go to initial state quickly at the begining of the show? (oh, and if you know how to do this with AR and A4 to that would be great)

Sorry if my questions are stupid :slight_smile:

Any other hints / tips on playing live long gigs with the machine, please post.

1 Like
2

Go to the Analog Four settings and change this:

KIT RELOAD ON CHG
will cause kits to reload to their saved state automatically as soon as a new kit becomes active. This is useful if you for example play live and have tweaked a kit, want to save it and then return to a pat-tern featuring the same kit, but with its original settings

3

Look into sample chains. Each sample can be split into 64 equal slices. If you make a sample with 64 8 bar (or any length) loops you can easily switch to any section by having the track set to slice and changing the start point.

4

… rather than splitting our tracks up into 8 bar loops I could insert the whole track (like the whole bass track for instance) and just trigger the different sections of it - which would make it like 1 sample instead of maybe 8 per. song)

This will work fine - on some of my sets I have a load of 512 bar samples, all sliced to 64 slices and loaded into static machines. One huge sample for bass loops, one for leads etc. You can easily create 64 different OT patterns this way only using 8 static sample slots.

Or you could create one pattern and progress through an arrangement on the fly by mapping different combinations of slices to different scenes.

…Transitions

You already mentioned the main 2 ‘tricks’ really. I use the OT to trigger Ableton scenes via midi notes too which gives me some time to build things up again on the OT. I’m sure other ppl will have all sorts of tricks.

Settings:

I’ve found its best practice to save a master copy of your live set and just reload this before each gig. The only downside is that any decent adjustments you made while playing at the gig are lost.

5

Thanks guys, all helpfull tricks!
Hoping to bring it live for the first time to Bonheur festival in Germany in April - so have some time to make things sit.

Any more videos / tips please post!

Much love
Vegard

6

Also one more thing I was wondering. Is there a way to get follow-actions? Like chain/arranger mode, but only at parts?

Scenario is that I am playing my song, and I go into the break, when the break is done I want it to jump to the next part of the song automatically - so I don’t forget. I guess I can do it with chain / arranger (whatever it’s called) - but I would like to only have it at parts and not having to plan the whole set, kinda.

In Ableton we use follow action, is there anyhint like this on the Octa?

7

There is impromptu Pattern Chaining that you can manually set up.

Also, you can jump into and out of Arranger mode at any time.

But you need to try these two options out to see whether they exactly meet your needs.

8

There is impromptu Pattern Chaining that you can manually set up.

Also, you can jump into and out of Arranger mode at any time.

But you need to try these two options out to see whether they exactly meet your needs.[/quote]
Thank you!
Will of course do quite a bit of practice runs before we put it on stage :slight_smile:

Sorry for asking all these questions, they are probably in the manual, but it’s quite a steep learning curve on the machine!