Octatrack Tips & Tricks (OT Tips)

[Neimad]

Yeah for sure, My buddy runs his OT through sp404 vinyl sim with good results. But yeah I really wanna try that recipe when i get home tn

[sezare56]

Realtime Synced Arp!

FN+Bank (Grid Rec off) > Scale Per Track
Fn+Scale > 2/16
Set your arp settings
Hold the first trig with a toothpick or whatever*.
Set your keyboard on autochannel.
Done.

That way you can play with your arp perfectly synced with the sequencer in realtime with external keyboard!

Add random lfo on Note LEN to alternate chords / arp. (LEN = 0 = no arp)

*If you use it a lot : solder a switch!

[matB]

If If play an arp with NLEN 0 I wont hear a chord but an arp …
Do I missed something ?

[sezare56]

Yes, if you read carefully, I’m talking about NOTE page LEN.

[matB]

Ah okay !!! Very good ! Thank you !
Saddly this wont let me use the arp scale helper with biggest chords from my keyboard but it’s a nice trick …

(Im personnaly trying to apply the Scale mode help to more than 4 notes chords) (but allready have a lot to practice on with those last messages :hap:)

Good night guys

[jbone1313]

My best tips for quick, click-free sampling:

Declick

I did some testing yesterday, and I can confirm what @sezare56 says about the delayed application of FIN and FOUT. Those settings are pretty useless, especially when sampling looping patterns where there is some latency. The reason is that the placement of the fade will probably not necessarily line up with the placement of the audio due to the latency. In the course of my testing, I learned some other important things. I am sharing here in case it helps anyone else. When you are sampling a l…

OT Ableton audio printer: No excuses for bad sounding OT mixes.

Transferring Octatrack audio tracks to computer?

Ok, this is insane. I have a test Ableton project setup, which seems to be working. It is as close to an automatic OT printer as I can imagine. It’s almost like Overbridge for Octatrack. No Max4Live required. It sounds like a lot of work, but you only need to set all this up one time. I don’t have time to share it and polish yet, but the basic idea is this: 8 scenes. MIDI map notes to launch those scenes. Setup 8 MIDI tracks, one for each OT channel. In each track, you have 8 MIDI clips wit…

No more latency when sequencing Ableton from OT or monitoring OT (or other synced hardware) through Ableton:

Solution for ITB-OTB clock sync and latency in Ableton

Well, I think I discovered an even better solution for all this, and I updated the OP to refer to this post accordingly. Turn on Reduced Latency When Monitoring. Do not place any latency inducing devices in any signal path through which you are monitoring machines you are syncing or instruments you are playing or triggering with a hardware sequencer, EXCEPT for External Instrument device. The External Instrument device does not seem to add latency to the INSTRUMENT tracks on which they are pla…

[dan271]

wavetable-style quick tip - set loop size exactly 674 samples - will be C note

[sezare56]

wavetable-style quick tip - set loop size exactly 674 samples - will be C note

Yep. I used G note, the most precise I found to be close to 440 hz tuning with 225 / 450 / 900 samples.
Tip to find other notes from C with 674 samples : L = length in samples, n = semitones
L = 674 / 2^(n/12)

Example for G
L = 674 / 2^(7/12) = 450 samples

Btw, I’d rather calculate from G.

[quartzwatch]

I wanted a trig-sync triangle lfo that starts at the lowest value (not halfway up). Midi designer has a low resolution and sounded too grainy. Working with a midi track so no slides.

My solution was to use two saw lfos on the same parameter, one going up and one down. For the first two bars I locked the depth off on the 2nd saw, the second two bars the depth off on the 1st saw. Can have fun tweaking the different rates as well.

Note: Designer would have worked for my goal as well, see below

[sezare56]

Midi designer has a low resolution and sounded too grainy.

Did you try Trig + Tempo in lfo designer?

To interpolate between two steps, select a waveform step by pressing and holding the corresponding [TRIG] key and then press the [TEMPO]

[quartzwatch]

!! somehow I didn’t know this existed. I feel like I learned it early on and lost it in all my other octa learnings.

I’m glad I went down my rabbit hole as its useful without taking a designer slot, but yea I gotta interpolate!

[sezare56]

You seem tired Bugs!
Btw we have the same 3 strings guitar!

That tip to keep in topic.

Fn+Knob seems to work for active channel view only (left by default).

Set change to both channel view to select zero crossings for both channels (it selects also left channel zero crossing when there is only left, same for right).

[darenager]

Funny enough in the lab notes doc I’m working on I mention this method of using exact number of samples for pitch, as well as getting another 2 octaves down using rate, and numbers for additional octaves.

[Open_Mike]

Was checking out @Veets’s wonderful Next level Guide and came across this which I never considered, makes we want to get into plays free tracks more. The clip is from pg. 73 and its continued and expanded upon on pg. 74, link to PDF below…

-New way to transition between tracks! (Like Ableton) (2016)-

Here’s a link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMhA8a6SiMU I had a BIG breakthrough tonight. I found that if you turn off loopmode and use the trigs to fire off clips in “plays free mode” you can have the OT act EXACTLY like Ableton’s launch capabilities for transitioning. The only caveat: it only works for loops. Still great though! You can always sample your sequenced out stuff into a spare track. Here’s how: 1) Turn on all tracks to play free. Set the trig mode to ONE2. Now when you hit a trig it’ll start to play and will be synced. I have it synced to the pattern length. 2) Make sure all your loops have loop mode set to OFF Now, let’s say you’ve got 2 patterns. Most people, including me, would transition using the crossfader trick. Now, there’s no need to. You can switch patterns and replace each track one by one. So, you’ve playing your track, turning tracks off and on. Now it’s time to transition. Turn Loop Mode to ON on ALL the loops you want to carry over. Then, you can switch patterns and have those loops still playing. As long as your next pattern is setup the same way they won’t fire until you hit a trig. So, now you can replace the bassline with a touch of the trig! Then swap out the kick drum, then hats etc! It works great! The only issue is that it’s annoying to change the loop mode (well, to me it is). Does anyone know if there is a SYSEX command that can control this? Have fun!

ElektronNextLevel2016.pdf

[phaelam]

Throwing Snow getting FULL use out of an OT…

[GirTheRobot]

If you like the way a sample sounds at rate 48 AKA 3/4 speed, but still want it to stay in time, change its pattern length to 3/4. Depending on the type of sample and the rest of the bits you got going on, you may need to do this for every track so it all remains in time.

[smokyfrog]

Anyone got a tip for quickly toggling quantize record, in the same way I can do on the A4? Mostly I record unquantized then perform it manually later if necessary but it strikes me I could be missing a shortcut.

[jbone1313]

P-lock override? P-locking the p-locks?

I discovered this one today.

I have never seen it discussed before. For me, it is very handy.

I wanted to be able to quickly adjust the pitch of all trigs on a pattern, even if the pitch was already p-locked.

But, I did not want to use a scene, because I wanted to quickly duplicate patterns and change values like, e.g., pitch, and have them apply to the whole pattern, so that I could build pattern variations. This here seems to work a treat.

So…

I setup a custom LFO at a fixed level, and I made its target the pitch parameter.

BOOM!

Now, simply turning the depth knob adjusts the pitch relative to the existing p-locks.

It would probably also be really cool to map depth to a scene, modulate depth with another LFO, or p-lock it.

This would obviously work for any parameter.

[sezare56]

I have never seen it discussed before

Search a bit…
You can also use square lfo with speed = 0, faster to set up.
Can be used for fine tuning (0.2/127 precision), slice offset to change a drum kit…
OctaEdit - Win/OSX Octatrack Software Editor