Octatrack Simulate HH/OH choke

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Goal: With one sample track, have a constant OH (3,7,11,15) pattern and polyrhythmic HHs.

I’ve tried a 2 ways to get at this, with mixed results:

  1. A trig on each step with no velocity and the OH sample. Using one lfo for the OH velocity, one for the HH velocity, and one to switch the OH sample to the HH sample. This was OK but the silent trigs ended the OH sample even when they weren’t audible. I can use reverb to simulate the tail but this isn’t ideal.
  2. Trigs on 3,7,11,15 with the OH Sample and retrig time set to 1 step. Using one lfo to modulate the number of retrigs and one lfo to change the sample. This worked ok but swing does not impact retrigs so the sound was a bit too gridded for my taste.

A question I had at the root of this is: can you actually mute trigs in some way via an LFO. Not just take the volume to 0, but actually have them not stop a playing sample.

Any other ideas on how I could achieve this? My goal was to control these LFOs via the crossfader so I could easily switch up my HH patterns while doing other things. I really don’t want to hardcode a bunch of different patterns to achieve this, or create a bunch of different loops.

#2

You’re talking about midi tracks?
Velocity = 0 = note off.
So you can achieve this with lfo on velocity.
There’s a thread about it.

#3

Hey sezare56, thank for the reply! But nah, I’m looking to do it with samples.

#4

Use the samples on the same voice?

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#5

Yea, but I want to be able to use the crossfader (connected to the lfos) to turn the hi-hat samples on/off. Turning down the velocity to 0 doesn’t work for this because the trig still mutes the OH sample.

#6

Have a second track with just the OH samples?

Also, there’s a way to put multiple streams on a single track, and you can use the spatializer to select them

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#7

Interesting. Tomorrow I try it !
@quartzwatch, don’t know if we can talk about velocity for audio tracks.

If you make a sample with HH + OH, what about lfo on slice start with the intended cycle ?

Other idea, play samples with 2 midi tracks.

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#8

Could you write you’re exact settings or even the project in order to try to find a solution for you ?
I’d do it with slices but maybe it doesn’t fit…

#9

Thanks for that trick, it is really useful with mono stuff !
Actually you can adjust mid (MG) and side (SG) gain as you like, with one of those setting is set to 127.

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#10

Sorry for my lack of replies on this, life came up! I’m going to look at everyone’s replies this weekend when I’m in front of my octatrack.

#11

Back when I was heavily into the MPC2000xl I’d do this by using an OHH sample and assigning the decay time to the fader so that with the fader down the fast decay (set to start at note on not note off) I’d get a closed hat sound and with it all the way up I’d get the full open hat sample, with continuously variable choke/half-open sounds in between. Really expressive and works great for natural sounding hat parts in particular.

I’ve never tried it but I think you could get a similar effect using plocks to adjust the hold and/or decay of the open hat sound, although you couldn’t play it live as easily as on the MPC. I’ll give it a shot after work today and report back.

#12

Just tried it, works really well.

-Loaded up a sample of a DR110 open hi hat into a flex machine
-In the main AMP page, set the hold to minimum and tweaked the release time until I got a snappy, short, closed hihat sound. The sweet spot was in the mid 40s.
-Plocked the release time to INF on the steps where I wanted an open hi hat.

If there’s a trig on the next step it cuts off the open HH sound of course, and using a trigless lock on one of the next steps with the release time plocked to around 55 gave me a good choked hi hat sound.

Just out of curiosity I tried locking the open and closed release values to a pair of scenes so I could play the crossfader like a hi-hat pedal the way I like to use the data slider on the MPC and that also technically works fine but it’s fussier to play and not as convincing as it is on the MPC, because of the way the OT handles real time parameter changes (the MPC is way more limited there but in this case the limitations actually seem to work in its favor, plus you can record fader changes on it so you can lay out a hh pattern and then overdub your chokes live in a second pass; on the OT you’d have to resample to do that but again it would definitely work). Totally usable though, it’s just going to take a bit more practice to get it sounding good than it did on the MPC. Using plocks like I described above works really well though, and sounds better than using different open and closed HH samples to my ear.

I don’t have time today but I can probably toss together a short video demo tomorrow afternoon.

EDIT: thinking about it a bit more, this is more or less how analog drum machines typically work, by using the same tone source with different envelopes to create the open and closed hat sounds, so it’s probably especially suited to x0x style programming and samples of analog machines.

When I have more time I’m going to mess with using other kinds of samples as starting points for building hats this way, no reason you couldn’t use almost anything. In fact, if I had a radio I’d try tuning it to static, running that into a thru machine, and using a combo of trigless trigs (to trigger the envelope for the actual hits), trigless locks (to vary the decay for open an closed HH sounds) and maybe the filter, that would probably sound amazing. Doing the same thing with any analog noise source would be really good, I bet. Plug a cheap distortion pedal into the OT input and turn it all the way up so the self-noise was as loud as possible, and use that as a noise source. Stick a little lapel mic inside of a computer and use the fan noise. So many possibilities.

EDIT AGAIN: nope, too much other stuff to get done today for me to do a video demo, but I’ll get to it eventually.

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#13

or, much simpler (and as stated before i guess): program OH and CH the way you want them in different variations on two tracks. now resample the whole output and have several perfectly matching 4 bar loops with different Hihat-Patterns. Sample lock the loops on different patterns on a single Flex track - DONE!

Now you can set tons of trigless trigs on the patterns to add variation to taste. Retrigger the Env/LFO on various trigless trigs and use the LFO to modulate sample start/end points. Set up scenes to modulate the LFO Depth. The list goes on. I think there is no need for even more stuff on Hihats … in a full mix you wont hear subtle changes anyway ^^

#14

That’s a good idea, although it’s quite a bit more complicated to set up.

My last post probably makes it sound a lot more complicated than it actually is because I kept thinking of different little variations you could play with, but the basic technique is really simple, just load one sample, adjust two amp parameters, program your hi hat pattern and then use plocks to put in the open hi hat hits. Nothing to it, I’m sure plenty of people already thought of it years ago. I know I didn’t make up the MPC version of it, although I forget where I learned it originally.

#15

yeah, true that. but the OP wanted the variation in the pattern without loosing the decay of the OH once the CH comes into play :wink: PLocking the AMP/Decay doesnt solve that because: Once you have CHs close to the OH its decay is cut away again. Even if a Trigless Trigs resets the ENV for the shorter sound to come through - the Decay from the actual step before is cut away instantly. And this is for a simple reason: the Sequencer is monophonic! You can only have the CH playing while the OH is still decaying if you program their patterns on separate tracks - easy as that :wink: Its the same for other sounds too. So - why making the world more complicated than it actually is? The OT is perfect for such resampling tasks, its really easy. And once you have both as a Loop - new worlds open up for even more creative juice - if you so desire :smiley: Or you simply go away with the variations you just recorded and this is as easy as PLocking the Sample on every other pattern. Thats the beauty of the OT imho and one of the reasons why the 8 Tracks are usually not a limitation …

[edit] forgot to mention: yeah, you have to do a little bit of menu work, saving the loops and reassigning them. but this doesnt take long and you get used to it after a while. doing it more or less automatically without thinking :slight_smile: this way your creativity isnt interupted :wink:

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#16

Haha, you’re totally right, I completely misinterpereted the OP’s question somehow and thought the goal was to choke the open hi hat sound without triggering a closed hi hat sound - the exact opposite of what they were asking about. My suggestion definitely doesn’t make any sense for that at all.

#18

This is a cool trick Ryan! So the spatializer is being used to “re-mono” the track right?

I’m currently running all my octatrack tracks panned left and using right as an extra send (e.g. running my octatrack in mono) so I think this would conflict. Even if this doesn’t get me to the specific goal of the topic its definitely a useful trick to know about for future building :slight_smile:

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#19

@umonox / @Supercolor_T-120 Thanks for the tips. My goal is a bit weird because I’m trying to apply a flow I have from my Tanzbar CH/OH to my Ocatrack. I loved having a polyrhythmic CH pattern overtop of a non-poly OH pattern and was exploring how I could milk this out of my octatrack (as I’ve gotten tired of the Tanzbar HH sound).

Its definitely true that I could use sampling to get close to what I wanted, but the resampling seemed a bit annoying if I wanted to do tweaking after the fact. Also, with the 4 bar loop method I am no longer able to get the polyrhythmic HH variation I was looking for, tho in the end different forms of variation are probably usable enough. I do a lot with interlocking polyrhythms on different drums so I’ll have to see how it fits!

@sezare56 You are right, I could probably get this working my using two of my midi tracks and feeding them back into my octatrack for control. Heck, even using one may give me what I need, but I’ll have to brain on that more. Sadly midi tracks can’t be altered via crossfader without more midi routing, but definitely something to think about

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#20

oh ok. well, in that case set a full 4 bar loop for the OH but set a different track length for the CH. this gives you polyrhythmic variation of the CH on the second track and you can still record both into a single 4 bar loop again. you can also increase the recording time; exceeding the standard 64 steps to record more than one pattern cycle. but i must pass this to the more experienced OT users because i have never recorded more than 64 steps. i had no need for that so far :wink:

#21

I’ve ended up taking the approach of using a midi track and looping it back to trigger an audio track. That midi track triggers the OH while the CH is pre-set in the audio track.

I’m running into some weird midi feedback with the midi signals I’m using to trigger external gear. @sezare56 have you used midi loopback before yourself?

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