I agree completely. I used to be in the “overwhelmed by possibilities” boat, but I picked one up last year when a good deal popped up and have had a great time. I spent a month or two in a “playground” project, where I just tried out different ideas, made mistakes, lost stuff, but didn’t care, because that’s what it was for. Take things in small chunks. It helps to have an idea about what you want to do when you start a project. After a while, you develop a sense for how you want to work with OT. The insane learning curve is for people who get an OT and try to be Dataline on day 2.
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A Super Dooper Baller Looper
I’m the Baller and it’s the Looper 
Hope to share some music soon.
Oaktown Wizard
sho you right and damn love that username!
Word!
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Great impressions of the machine!
I parted with mine for a period which I certainly won’t be doing again, the Octa really is a source of inspiration, really dig the midi control capability’s and the wild accidental sounds I manage to generate, this week I’m using it to make layered samples which are then fed into the RYTM for further manipulation and creation of patterns.
Also found the Octa a dream for live remixing and sampling , the beats gets crazy / interesting really fast👌
yeah, I feel like I sit somewhere betwixt these two concepts too 
@AdamJay I need a midpoint FOR please
A beast of a machine…
Whoops!
note: arranged in Live and cut from there…
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Decided to finally get learning with my MKII this week since stuck at home.
I’m guessing it’s best to start with no other devices at first and just the factory samples.
Any advice welcome. In the middle of downloading the MKII video from Mac Pro Videos / Ask
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i think having some kind of musical goal in mind is the best approach. this machine has too much going on to just sit down and learn it all. there is still much of this powerful machine that i haven’t learned yet, and i’m ok with that.
ps - can’t help but feel a little left out with the the whole overbridge thing, but i need only remind myself that independence from the pc was a primary objective in the first place
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I’ve only had my OT MkII for about a week and loving it so far. Coming from a background in loop-based music and Ableton Live, it was fairly easy to get started with basic sequencing, but I know I’m barely scratching the surface with how I’m using it so far. It’s also made me realize that a great song can be created with 8 tracks or less, and many of my 25+ track songs on Ableton could’ve been achieved in the 8 tracks of the OT.
Once I get more practice I’m going to start exporting my previous tracks into stems that I can then flexibly remix on the fly. Exciting stuff!
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I love how adventurous the Octatrack is. One example was diving in to run free mode and sequencing the trigs of each track from midi tracks, super weird results.
I love making glitchy head scratching music that makes people go “I don’t know wtf I just heard, but I want hear more” and the octatrack is perfect for that sort of thing.
I’m patiently training my octatrack to evolve to groktatrack.
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I’m curious how well the ol’ CF cards handle lots of stem playback, as I get closer to actually buying the OT.
What I compose in Ableton I plan to perform live with the stems in the OT, but instead of just stemming everything out (silent breaks and all) I suspect I may have to be a bit economical and break some parts into smaller pieces/into flex tracks (e.g. drum parts) instead of long stems? Is that true, or will it motor through 8 simultaneous static/stems without a hitch?
I’ve only used stem playback sparingly and it has work fine.
Personally I do not assume that the OT can handle playback of lots and lots stems from the CF card. For one, the CF tech is old, and so is the OT (even the MKII which is more or less the MKI with a subjectively better skin). I feel a lot better and secure when I put in the work to break things down and sequence accordingly. My thought is to push the OT hard in the studio, but be more mindful in a live setting.
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@Tapepusher You’ll be good. The only time I’ve ever had an issue with mine is recently when using very long samples, ie using a full album dl’d from YT. You may/may not run into some weird behavior, and I haven’t really gotten a response back for what happened in that moment, other than to update to latest firmware. Otherwise, OT will do everything you want, and also everything you didn’t know you wanted, but it sounds fresh, so it’s staying in there 
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I found that longer stems on static machines sometimes don’t start to play reliably when using one shot trigs and switching between patterns/banks. Might be user error though, but I’m pretty sure sometimes it’s also just stumbling. It’s my one main gripe with OT and makes me feel unsafe to use OT live tbh.
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