Octatrack FX kick ass

Not sure why the general consensus seems to be “they’re alright”–because they rock my socks off. We all know the dark reverb is unbelievably lush. The spring reverb sounds remarkably like my Fender Blues Jr., and that wet, springy-bouncy effect is so good on percussion samples. Being able to pan any of the reverbs let’s you do some awesome studio tricks like the Van Halen guitar trick (guitar hard left, reverb hard right), or even just panning it the same side as the source. Only disappointment here is not being able to route an LFO to the panning, or p-lock it (unless I missed that somehow), but I’ll live.

Chorus is deep and watery. Phaser and flanger behave like you’d expect, plus routing an LFO to their DEL really makes them swoosh. Compressor is solid at beefing up drums and I need to dig into it more…Delay is of course super versatile and does what a delay should. Filter is juicy and warm. I haven’t messed with the EQs or the comb filter much but I’m sure they’re fine. Spatializer is great for M/S processing.

Lo-Fi is the only one I’m not too impressed with yet, even though I keep putting it on things to try it out anyway. The distortion is fine in small doses I suppose, and idk if I’m just not big on SRR or what but it’s never done much for me–even on the Monomachine. But I like it when I hear other people use it so maybe it’s just me.

I’m also a big fan of the Monomachine FX and how everything’s p-lockable and LFOable, only downside of course being that it takes up a track, so if you want to use it in poly mode you’re SOL…But then you just route the MnM to the OT and you’re fine :stuck_out_tongue:

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Conversely, I really dig the Lofi fx!

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What are you putting it on? Anything in particular?

I’ve tried it on full drum samples, samples of a couple bars of music, individual drum sounds, various FX/textures and nothing has stuck yet.

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On all sorts to be honest.

Sounds particularly nice on vocals - amf about 50/60, amd in the 70’s.
Ran it over some strings earlier and that gave a nice crisp finish

Ooh and a guitar riff last night, pitched down a bit, sprinkled some Lofi and got some nice gnarly sounds.

I find the distortion to easy to dial in too much, and brr is similar to the DT so I don’t really do too much of that.

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I love the Dark Reverb as well…in send mode with a bit of LP. It’s amazing when you send a mono synth signal thru the octatrack, dark reverb. You’ll get a nice signal out.

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It seems to me the distortion on all their boxes a little goes a long way…Same with vibratto LFOs.

I guess I’ll just keep trying the lofi on whatever I put into it. Certainly couldn’t hurt.

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Get a clean vocal and try that. I keep thinking back to the part I was messing with last night and it sounded so bloody good

Agree that across the board, dist is a bit much

I’ve been meaning to sample some acapella into my Octatrack anyway. Do you have any recommendations/sources/youtube videos? How does one usually find acapella?

I rarely ever put vox through OT, I really should though. i’ve fucked around putting long poetry readings on youtube or random shit on netflix and live chopping it over beats but never really much clean singing takes. could do with a decent source for clean female vox. could just get out and collab but I don’t really want to make anything serious in that area and I doubt many artists out there want me to chop their takes into unlistenable noise lmao

This was the first thing that came to mind. I don’t think she’d care what you do with her vox

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Hahah finding a vocalist that is happy to have their vocals mangled beyond recognition might be a bit difficult!

YouTube is always a good source for that stuff, although I do struggle to find stuff without backing music.

If you look on places like beatport you can usually find albums put out by labels with accas in. The Defected acca albums are great for classic house vox.

The piece I was using was from a how to destroy angels track aka NIN with female vox

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Sweet channel, thanks! Nice singing and 'tude

The Youtube music community kinda kicks ass. Watch Rick Beato and Adam Neely if you haven’t already. Rick’s a fucking wizard (and his children are, too…all of them with perfect pitch) and Adam is a memester millenial who knows a lot about jazz and more nebulous music theory concepts like negative harmony, A = 432 (he hates it), other stuff.

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ill give the vid a listen, cheers. adam Neely knows his shit well but I find him sort of condescending, not sure if its just me but he seems sorta cocky. if its the guy im thinking of

I have had OT MkII for six months but had been too distracted by my modular to focus on it until the upcoming Science Lab gave me a push in the right direction…

As I said in that thread, I admit I was a bit worried about using only (or largely) the onboard reverbs for an entire year so yesterday I put Dark Reverb through its paces.

It’s really great! I think people have some weird ideas about reverb. I bet all your favourite records were made with reverbs thay aren’t objectively “better.”

The thing with FX is you can’t dissociate them from the context in which they were made. If they don’t sound good to you it may be because you like different music…

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The trick is to search for acapella cover songs. Lots of them about. :slight_smile:

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Yeah I agree. It seems a lot of people want big, long, gigantic, cavernous reverbs which can totally be fine for some contexts…But 99% of the time I just want a little bit of wetness so that my sound isn’t so dry/in your face. Even when I’m producing in a DAW, probably half the time I end up using the Little Plate by Soundtoys just because, again, I want to give a guitar or a percussion it’s own little room, mix it in about 20-30% wet and it’s good–no fuss.

I also liked the Gatebox reverb on the Machinedrum. Not sure what the general consensus was on that.

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stumbled across his channel recently
rather rock focussed but he is excellent as a presenter on countless levels - very likeable enthusiastic and generous guy and his insights are interesting even when the music may not be your thing - you just know a day hanging with him in his studio would be relaxed and pleasant not to mention educational

sorry to keep it ot for a moment


The OT FX are sorta hard to explore if you want to keep a filter to hand and either delay/reverb - sure you can set T8 to be a host for 'verb and so on - there’s gold in them there hills for sure, but I find the vanilla position of some effects can be enough to put you off exploring - it’s one of those requests that would be a dream i.e. to have a way to store presets on board - would be so much more convenient

but I’m enthused to give them a workout, especially given the OT yearlong challenge brewing up

Another thing I’m finding really interesting is unorthodox FX combinations and routings by using Neighbour machines.

The FX in my Analog Four, though I love them, get a bit boring because I can’t mess them up enough.