I’m putting together a live set on my Octatrack and I keep encountering some weird behaviour that I can’t understand…
In Ableton I’ve taken my original songs and split them into 6 stems. The content of each stem stays broadly the same across the songs; I’ve got two tracks of drums, a bass track, two of keys, and one of vocals. The stems from each song are arranged into sections that will loop. Each section is 8 bars long. There are four sections in each song.
I’ve exported six 32 bar stems for each track. Each stem is effectively a sample chain with four sections.
On the Octatrack I’ve got six static tracks to play back the stems, then a flex track for looping effects and a master track for whole song effects. Basically a version of an EZBOT template (I’ve recreated it, rather than downloading one from him).
For the first song I loaded a stem into each one of the six static tracks, then applied a 4 slice grid on them all (no zero crossing alignment). I made four 8 bar patterns (64 steps at 1/2 scale), with one trig on step one of each. Those trigs are p-locked to the slices, so all the tracks on pattern one play slice one of their respective stem, all the tracks on pattern two play slice two and so on.
So far, so good. Works like a charm! I can move through the different sections of the song by changing patterns, mute and unmute tracks and apply effects. This going great!
Then I loaded the stems from the next song into the sample list, copied the four patterns to the next four slots and p-locked the samples on the trigs on each track to play the new song. This is where it started going wrong. Despite all the stems being the same length and same tempo, with the exact same export settings, the samples didn’t play back properly. I worked out that it was starting each slice two steps after where it should do, so it was starting the new section on the second beat of the bar and then it would play the first two steps of the next section before looping back around. Moving from section to section sounded like a mess.
I eventually got the second song working, but I’m not entirely sure how. I thought it might be because the slice grid had gone weird, so I deleted it and re-set it on every track. No joy. I messed with it for a couple of sessions, turning the OT off in between. Eventually I deleted all the patterns for song two and made them all from scratch (rather than copying the song one patterns). This seemed to work, so I had two working songs.
I’m sure you can guess what’s coming next…
This evening I loaded the stems from song three into the sample list and, having thought I’d learned my lesson, I made the four patterns from scratch. But once again, it’s not working!
I’ve deleted the patterns and remade them several times. Deleted and re-created all the sample grids. I can’t work it out.
One weird thing I’ve noticed is that if I don’t p-lock the sample start on the new song it plays section one perfectly, but if I p-lock it to slice 1 it puts it off grid by two steps. I’ve checked the slices and they definitely start at the very beginning of the section on every track.
Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here? What weird buried setting am I missing? What naive misapprehension am I working under with this set-up?
