Hi folks, long time no post.
As a long time Elektron twiddler I cautiously held off going the Octa route, fearing the reports of complexity and head scratching, until in Japan a few months ago, I went to the shop for a Digitakt and came back with an Octatrak.
I don’t know why but I did, and I’m really pleased I did.
Don’t know what I was expecting, but with the familiarity of the other Elektron gear, and an understanding of how a new piece of kit needs bringing into the fold, it didn’t take long before I was up and running and peeling off the many layers of it’s potential (and continue to do so). Great stuff.
So, a sampling question.
I’ve got used to “dirty sampling” and trig sampling (more or less with a few errors here and there), but I can’t find the best approach for the following situation:
I have my OP-1 going into the AB inputs and I’m playing some keys over the top of an Octatrak pattern I already put together. What I want to do is record the little riff I’m playing whilst listening to the pattern (because the riff fits with the pattern so I need to hear it).
It would be nice to have the pattern cycle through once to orient myself before playing the keys over the top, but that might be too much to ask.
Take a look at manual sampling (the setup pages that is):
You can quantize manual sampling which means that once you hit the sample button, it will not start sampling immediately but on the next loop of the pattern.
Once you set it up like that, you can listen to your pattern as long as you wish and once you want to go for it you simply hit the sample a/b button while the pattern is playing…The ot will start sampling on the moment it reloops the pattern.
Ah ha, thanks Merlin!
I’ve been using manual sampling but not with the pattern playing, just in the fashion Cuckoo showed in his sampling video.
I’ll have a look into that.
There’s a lot of ways to do this, I’ll describe using a pickup machine…
Set a track as a pickup machine,
Rec Setup 1: INAB: A B RLEN:64 TRIG:One2
Rec Setup 2: AB: 127 QREC: 64 QPL: 64
Mixer: DIR: 0
With your pattern rolling if you select the pickup track it will monitor the a/b inputs (due to Rec2 AB:127, this is the monitoring volume). Press a/b and the pickup will start recording on the next cycle.
Pickups will go straight into overdub on the next pattern cycle, for playback press c/d sometime during recording or you can after it goes into overdub just don’t play anything for that next cycle…
Using a pickup it’s easy to monitor with fx and you can overdub easily if you want…
Superb, thanks Mike!
I just went and tried Merlin’s method with immediate success, but I’ve also been meaning to get my head around pickup machines now things are starting to bed in somewhat, so that’s actually a nice bare-bones primer for picking up the pick ups!