Seeing future retro announce the swynx at NAMM got me really excited, basic little box that means I can add swing and shuffle to my old Roland gear. I had previously had issues with lag and timing drifts using my old gear, but since buying the octa they all fall into line and stay put beautifully.
So I guess my question is, can the octa transmit it’s midi clock with slight % variations in order for me to swing my old gear without the need for a swynx?
It would be such a basic inclusion but absolute gold for me,
Thanks for reading
to my knowledge midi sync cannot be swung.
DIN sync can.
Maybe i’m wrong. I’m having my own weird midi sync issues with my Octa right now.
It can be done. If you’ve ever used a tracker before you’ll know that you can achieve swing effects by updating the clock speed at every tick.
I use this. http://mutable-instruments.net/midipal
It has a few clock modes, and one of them allows you to progress the clock every time you receive a note on a selected channel.
So you dedicate a MIDI channel on the Octatrack, put in a full row of 16th notes, add your swing, voila. External clock is swinging.
Each piece of gear responds to clock differently, so YMMV.
since it seems you can provide midi swing these day perhaps this feature could be built into the next major OS update? That would be a killer inclusion as I am trying as much as possible to use the OT as master for everything.
I would be nice to think beyond “swing” and into having individual step lengths subdivide the total time available to one pattern.
Like how “groove extraction” works in some DAWs.
Still, you can do this with the midipal, no problem.
well Octatrack midiclock is a pain because it doesn’t send start and stops correctly anyway…
I dedicate a couple of midi chans in the octa sequencer and then enter ‘clocks’ in the form of note trigs as I want them… with micro-timing and measures lengths you can achieve all sorts of swings and strange time signatures… that can also be changed when you change patterns!!
these midi notes are then sent to a midi-to-cvtrig device ( http://store.highlyliquid.com/collections/midi-decoders/products/md24 )… which I then patch up to sequencers etc. --if you enter notes to a 24 per quarter note base then it can also be used as dinsync with the appropriate converter cable…
also neat because you can mute the midi channels in performance and thus ‘stop’ some of the clock signals…