Octatrack LFO Trig Question

I am trying to do something on the octatrack where I use an LFO with LFO designer to duck the volume for the last two trigs of a 64 trig pattern. This is with a thru machine. I am wanting the lfo depth to be on a scene, so I can change the amount of total ducking. The issue I am having is that I can set the LFO depth with the scene, but the first trig at the start of the pattern trigs the LFO and causes it to duck. I want to be able to hit play and have the audio come in on the first trig, and then have later trigs be able to duck the audio with a lfo trig’ed to it. Is there a way of having an trig that doesn’t trig the LFO?

Id do it the other way round
1 st trig opens the thru machine.

Subsequent trigs are trigless trigs that activate ducking LFOs (using one shot mode)

Look up trigless trigs.

LFO depth can be modulated by the cross fader.

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I do essentially this. Although I tend to like the inverse exponential LFO, but the same principle. And often I’ll send the LFO to filter, rather than volume.

Another fun variation is to use the filter envelope and then set the envelope mode to retrigger on trigless trigs in the amp setup page. I think the right mode is “R+T”. This frees up the LFO, which can be useful.

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There is another way :

Make your duck fx with slides on VOL (eventually use microtiming on trigs).

Plock Scene A to normal VOL.

The scene having priority over plocks, you can morph from normal (Scene A), to duck fx (neutral Scene B).

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Ducking with the filter wdth (lfo with inverted exponential wave in one shot mode) sounds best to my ears. If you get the timing right, it can sound like the super smoothest compressor sidechain ducking, especially on low end heavy sounds, because of how the filter will sweep through the lows through the spectrum, eventually opening fully.
Bonus you can do weird things with filter base and or resonance for breaks or stuff like that.

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I figured out how to get the trigless trig to trig the LFO, but how do I keep the first trig that opens the thru machine from also trigging that ducking LFO? I am able to get it working by P-locking the trigs and having a scene change the depth of the LFO, but then the behavior is inverted to what I really want, with it ducking when no scene is active. Ideally I want it to work such that with no scene active it just plays from the start, no ducking. Then be able to move the crossfader to a scene that still starts the thru machine playing on the first step, but then have subsequent trigs (trigless or one shot or whatever works) duck the audio.

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If you are using one shot LFOs, have the first thru trig lfo depth to zero.
Then wait till the sequncer passes that trig before moving the fader.

You could also remove the trig while the pattern is playing ( if the amp env is set to INF, and the trig contains no other essential locks)

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Or trig the machine manually [Track Button]+[Play]. With amp hold and release set to inf, you only have to trig it once (until you switch the OT off or load a new project).

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The best way I have found to do it so far is to use trig locks to set the scene so there is no ducking, then when the scene is muted the ducking happens. Not totally ideal, but it works well enough to have a scene that is the “default” scene with no ducking instead of muting scenes. This is a funny thing thinking about the octatrack and the later devices. Elektron really did a great job of smoothing over some of these confusing aspects without getting rid of all the capability. I’m thinking things like p locking LFO trig modes, p locking which things trig, etc. Also the octatrack having like 5 different types of trig’s, sample trig’s, lock trig’s, trigless trig’s, one shot trig’s, so on and so on and so on, gets really confusing and I feel like the modern boxes do it a bit more intuitively. Very interesting traveling down the elektron history path and seeing the things that have changed and the things that haven’t.

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Yeah, OT is stil more flexible, because of all the different ways you can choose to retrigger/not trigger the filter and amplitude modulator (which makes sense for samples/loops), and because of the lfo designer, but later Elektrons are much more intuitive and the lfos are actually more flexible. You just decide if you want to trig the synth/sample, envelope and/or lfo per trig on one screen. Filter env retrig is just on/off in the menu on the Rytm, on the A4/AK you get retriggering and non retriggering env shapes and you can retrig env1 and env2 per trig. Want to retrig a free running lfo on certain step or need it to reset based on trig conditions? Simplest thing. On the OT I usually just build a custom lfo designer wave lol.

Combine lfo retrig with p-locking lfo shapes and lfo trig modes and you have a little mini lfo designer on the Analogs.

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I wonder if I’d use trig conditions, one shots or scenes for that duck fx. :content:

Picture ?
Show me your dirty lfo designer settings…:loopy:

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I usually do stuff like that (sync trig or one shot mode for synced rhythmic modulation).


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Speaking of the LFO on the digi’s, I am totally spoiled by how fast they can go, I was a little disappointed by the OT’s max LFO speed.

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Did you try with lfo designer ? 8 times faster iirc.

LINEA

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I don’t hear any difference (tested with triangle wave vs. lfo designer sine).

Btw, those lfo designer drawings are really cute!

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You can make 8 tri waves with lfo designer. :wink:
8 times faster.

From La Linea.

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@Schnork, no excuses !

Ah, of course! Have to admit I usually do fm outside of OT and sample back in, but 8x triangles is really cool! That’s borderline audio rate.

Had to play around with it, crossfader is soo much more fun for fm than Rytm’s pads or A4/AKs joystick.

I’ll give the cymbals another try later. :wink:

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