Octatrack Live Set Specific Workflow Question

Elektron Gear Octatrack
1

Hey Elektronauts,

For the past several months i’ve been getting acquainted with the Octatrack and absolutely love it. Finally starting to get a good live looping workflow down with my gear setup and generally speaking understand most of the main concepts. I have a fairly specific question that I couldn’t easily find an answer to and was hoping you all could lend some perspective.

I want to do a live set with all of my previously recorded tracks included. I am hoping to set it up to do the following.

-Each track plays at its original tempo
-Each track begins playing after the one before it has finished
-Ideally would like to set a fade out to fade in or some sort of cross fade between each track
-Set up a variety of effects scenes to be apply to currently playing track while the set plays

I imagine for the original tempo aspect I can simply load my tracks as static samples into the static sample bank in the live set project and disable timestretch on each. Per the Cuckoo tutorial on backing tracks I understand that I could set them all up using the slot trig function and then either manually trig them or p-lock the slot # (aka track #) to play in the order i’d like.

I’m a bit confused on how I could set each track to play for its total duration and then have the next track begin playing automatically…I don’t believe there is a change pattern once track has completed setting but could be wrong. I’ve also been thinking on if there’s a possible way to automate playback via conditional trigs? Perhaps set the next trig to begin playing after the previous trig has concluded? Would love some thoughts on this aspect especially.

Additionally I would like to have it set so that the transition between the tracks playing is smooth even if just a matter of a fade out at the end of one track and a fade in at the beginning of the next. I was thinking of using a one shot LFO set to affect the volume of each track…which may be more difficult than i’m envisioning. I’ve also considered there may be a way to alternate the static machine track each track is playing on and by using the fader along with a scene controlling each track volume do a manual cross fade when I know a track is finishing up. This seems doable as well but it’s taking me a bit to figure out how I would configure this with everything else. Any additional advice of perspective on this aspect would also be great.

The live effects scenes aspect I get how to setup and am largely going of the Cuckoo backing track octatrack tutorial to set up a variety of effects scenes to mess with.

Does what i’m asking make sense? Does anyone else configure there sets like this? Am I on the right track with my thought process here?

Thank you!

2

I suggest that you try out the famous Octatrack “transition trick” as presented here:

2 Likes
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Great this is what I was looking for on that aspect. Thanks for that, I think the other time I looked that up it was the SRC 3 resample method rather than the SRC 3 track 8 method. Definitely like this method better.

Now I just gotta figure out the other things and i’ll be in business!

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There is neither a feature like repeat-pattern-until-stem-has-finished-playing nor some trickery with conditional trigs for this (awkward, I know).

The only automated workaround I can think of is using the arranger and configure there a specific number of pattern repeats which match the stem length.

But then: how to automate the transition? IMHO the OT isn’t designed as a playback machine. Even such simple things like what you want to do, can be quite hard to accomplish …

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Thanks for the reply. The more I thought about this today the more I realized what I wanted wasn’t really possible. I suppose I could always just cue up a pre-configured set of songs from my laptop into a thru machine then apply FX live or save that file as one long static recording to do the same.

Luckily there are plenty of other workflows I could do that would still be fun and sound good.

Cheers!