PARTS play important role in OT’s workflow, there is always one active that holds lot of settings and assignments.
I want to use them all but I get lost and confused often because I still have not learned to find that small one-line-info of active Part on the display.
Great idea:
I would make PARTS very friendly by pulling them out.
Instead of:
I will love fastest switching:
or:
in a bit bigger MKIII units 
Even better with MKI and MKII :
16 parts, choose them with PART + Trig 1-16
(Fn+Midi+Trig 1-16 for MKI)
In regular menu, choose Parts 1-4 with up, Parts 5-9 with right, etc…
Feature request!
Yeah that‘s what I want … the 4-part thing makes it impossible to be as flexible as with the Digitakt - but Digitakt is lacking ARP. So in the end I will have to fallback to Plocking every step when wanting to have other CCs for the ext MIDI gear.
Would be sick.
I honestly think parts make the OT more flexible than the digis…
They allow you to make multiple patterns that all share the same kit (part). Most of the time a part is worthy of using multiple patterns. One pattern is usually not enough to exploit the selected sounds and such that a part has defined. It becomes very nice to make a progression of patterns that all share the same sounds. This has a major, major benefit to live tweaking. If you say close the filter of a track on pattern one and then switch to pattern two, if it’s using the same part the filter will still be closed on pattern two instead of snapping to whatever it’s saved position is. Basically they allow for live improv tweaking over a progression of patterns…
I think what throws a lot of people off is that they think they should try to use parts by changing them on a pattern with the sequencer going. Parts are very much like drum machine kits, they’re main use is to link them to a pattern once and then forget about it. When you switch patterns the OT will also switch parts to whichever one you have linked to that pattern.
Another thing that throws people off is that there are only 4 per bank instead of 16. It’s really not that bad it just means for every 16 patterns you have 4 kits at your disposal. This is why a lot of people use patterns 1-4 linked to part1, 5-8 part2, 9-12 part3, 13-16 part 4. This allows you to make a progression of 4 patterns that share the same part and allow for improv tweaking, and then a new part for the next 4, etc…
All in all the OT has 64 parts. I do not recommend this but if you really wanted you could assign pattern1 to part1, pattern2 part2, pattern3 part3, pattern4 part4, for every bank. If you do this and simply ignore patterns 5-16 of every bank, the OT would behave just like the digis. You’d have 64 patterns each linked to their own part and you’d just use patterns 1-4 of every bank…
I really don’t think parts were intended to be changed for a pattern while that pattern is playing. They’re just like kits, you assign the to a pattern once and forget about it. Whenever you load that pattern again it loads the part you chose with it…
Even the lingo in the manual suggests nothing about trying to switch them mid pattern. It implies they are useful for different patterns to be linked to different parts in order to have different sounds/settings…
I do think it was intended that parts might be switched mid-pattern, after all it’s essentially an extension of the kit/part re-load functionality and it has always been a seemingly intentional MD/MNM performance device to swap kits on a playing part
I agree that your interpretation is the primary intention of the part paradigm, but a number of useful performance capabilities can be gained by switching parts on an active pattern, and these extra capabilities seem very intentional to me, particularly for an instrument like the OT. Even if you aren’t changing any of the audio playback machines you may want to alter recording setup parameters or deep MIDI settings like the arp sequences on the fly, without changing the pattern, and parts having access to these deep settings is no accident - they could have been stored and locked away in the project layer, not even being as accessible as the global slots on MD/MNM
I totally agree and have made posts about “next level” part switches mid pattern. It’s just that parts confuse so many people I’m trying to make it look as simple as possible. Once one gets the general use of parts and is ready to change parts mid pattern they’ll know it. But starting by doing it mid pattern seems to confuse a lot of people…
I was going to say that I don’t think the “primary” or “main” intention was to switch mid pattern, probably would have been better wording…
Thanks for the words. Hearing them in my head makes me see more scenarios that are probably not intended to happen and one can confuse something while trying to simplify.
These imagined four buttons for Parts:
maybe you do this already, but renaming them sometimes helps with this if I make the names visually distinctive enough, like a part named ‘XXXXXX’ it is hard not to notice the difference when switching from the default ‘ONE’ or ‘TWO’
I think why many people get confused with parts is you edit them while you are in a pattern and it’s placed over to other patterns.
What I am missing is that you can’t change parts quantized, only when changing patterns but not mid-pattern.
Here’s some clips from previous posts I’ve made…
All from this thread and there’s more on there too… I’m sure there are other useful threads about this too.
Strange issue when changing parts
Plocks on patterns must be considered strongly on a mid pattern switch because if not thought out they will affect different parameters on the next part. One needs to conceptualize exactly what will happen on the part switch and think it through very much for it to work smoothly and program accordingly. Even the exact timing of manual mid pattern part switch is critical as even performing it on different steps might yield different results.
Mid pattern part switches can be quantized using the arranger and its length and offset parameters…
Sometimes the way to go is rather than (as we often tend to do) try to make something work the way we want, instead try to work the way the thing works.
An example of this in this case might be to use a whole bank for variations of sections of a piece, so initially forget about parts, start working on your first pattern, copy it to another pattern and change the sequencing a bit, rinse and repeat until you filled a whole bank. Now listen back to your patterns and if you decide that some of them need different sounds copy the part and make the changes, so that eventually (which can happen quite quickly, working this way) you have 16 patterns with 4 sets (parts) of sounds. You have plenty of other banks which can all have their own set of patterns and parts.
So in effect rather than squeezing a lot of different pieces into one bank, the bank is used just for one piece but with multiple variations, this way you get to use parts in a more logical way, and your patterns are used more in a jamming/composition way than perhaps they would be with for example the Digitakt, where typically you’d tend to use fewer patterns for the same piece and more likely focus on muting and tweaking to ‘ring the changes’.
It was actually the Toraiz SP16 which made me think of the Octatrack in this way, because the SP16 only has 16 samples across 16 tracks across 16 patterns, but like the Octatrack there are no shortage of pattern banks each with their own sample set, so it becomes a focus on using more patterns with sequencing variations.
Of course on the Octatrack we have scenes which can be used to further enhance this, not to mention using statics say in one part to contain samples of other pieces in other banks to use for transitions and so on.
As others have said parts can at first feel a bit of a ball ache, but ultimately they can be used in many ways, making them actually more powerful than kits.
Yeah, you all got something there. But I still find it illogical that nothing gets saved per pattern except the trigs and thus you are forced to only have 4 instead of 16 changes per Bank. I don’t see why it should be a problem to save the states in patterns and it makes everything just harder for the people to use it. I always thought parts are a nice addition / performance tool but if you want to use the OT they are mandatory and there is no way around and with 4 parts for 4 patterns the idea to make transitions between patterns (4 to 5 e.g. when part 1 is connected to patterns 1-4) is totally breaking away imho.
It’s all about being able to make live improv tweaks that carry through pattern progressions… Many don’t seem to care about this but to many others its absolutely essential to their music. Parts/kits allow for this, strict association of all parameters to each individual pattern breaks this…
There is a very logical reason to not have all parameters strictly associated to individual patterns… I really think if you give it some time you might arrive to see their usefulness. We get more and more complaints on the digi threads as time goes by that there are no kits, because eventually folks hit the wall that parts/kits leaves an open door through, but it sometimes takes some time to see the wall…
I often rename the first part to the BPM. A nice reminder when having multiple ‘songs’ in a project with different tempos.
Haha, yeah … this is indeed something I have forgotten. You are totally right. I guess I’d come here with the opposite complaints if it was the other way around.
It also saves the part assignment, but not the actual part.
Octatrack isn’t safe…
It’s living dangerously… 
Good for thrill seekers, living on the edge, knowing your jam could be f***ed up at any moment… It’s possible to get a handle on it, but you might get hurt along the way… 
