i apologize for asking this as it may have been asked before, i’ve looked for this information everywhere but can’t seem to find anything.
is the octatrack capable of working as a midi recorder, i.e. i play an external synth’s keyboard and record this midi into an OT midi track? i know this wasn’t the case upon release but really hoping they have sorted it by know. if not, i guess you are forced into sequencing chords by way of manually knobbing your way there? or chromatic on OT? seems like something that would be rather simple for them to implement in any case.
With some setting up (not too much), yes you can play an external keyboard and record up to 4 simultaneous midi notes at a time on a midi track (limited to a max of 64 steps).
There are ways to get round the 4 note limitations - you could record into 2+ midi tracks on the same channel, that sort of thing.
thank you! are you still limited to 64 steps length-wise, or is there some way to create midi patterns of greater length aside from chaining patterns together?
You can work at half tempo.
I do that a lot, so if a song is naturally 165 BPM, I set my tempo to 82.5.
Then I have 8 bars, still only 64 steps though.
However, you can p-lock the arp on an off, somewhat giving you steps in between.
Really, the summary is – yes you can make it work that way, but as you said - it wasn’t originally designed with that as the primary function and even after multiple updates there are better alternatives.
You can even grab something like an old Alesis MMT-8 if you want something small and easy to manage. IMHO it’s better to get something dedicated to a particular task that works well rather than attempt to make one device do many things poorly.
Like is too short to be screwing around trying to make something work in an awkward way. Get the right tool and move on to the important things, like actually composing and recording.
If you use the Tempo Multiplier in Scale Setup, you can leave the Tempo where it is and have each Track run at 1/8x to 2x. They can be set individually if you use “Per Track” mode.