OT backing tracks as a performative tool

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Hey All,
I’m creating a new thread on backing tracks on the OT, just to give some new love to this functionality on the OT, to share a recent positive experience, and also to hear other’s philosophies on making the OT into a bit more than a playback machine in this context. The multiplicity of ways to approach the OT invite multiple levels of engagement with the instrument. I love that about this machine.

Anyway, I had a gig last Friday where I did an opening musical performance before a play (which I participated in along with other musicians and actors). My solo set consisted of focused improvisation on bowed tanbur (taksim) and then activating the track on the OT for the last 6 minutes and playing tanbur over a multi- layered drone accompaniment which I created using tanbur samples (in the Sampler instrument) in Ableton. It worked very well from my experience and set the mood nicely for the play.
So how are others currently using this creatively? The one great thing I’m discovering is putting a backing track on say, track 5 and then linking a couple neighbor tracks to that to manipulate fx live.

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#2

Sounds really cool! What was your approach, did you have a long wav file in a static machine and trigger it via a 1shot trig? I’ve used this method successfully before (sending click to a drummer as well), but it wasn’t super smooth for a couple of reasons:

  1. Because BPM isn’t kept in patterns, I had to manually move the BPM after each track. On reflection this could have been solved by using the arranger, but I was still new to the machine.

  2. A couple of times I nudged the rate knob by accident. This is catastrophic when playing back a long sample because it throws the track out of time with the click, and there’s no way to recover without stopping and going back to the beginning.

I like the idea of using a neighbour track and programming a bunch of scenes. Easy way to quickly spice up an otherwise hands-off performance.

#3

So, my approach with this one was for an ambient track, thus I didn’t have to worry about timing with the sequencer. I haven’t done that yet (backing with a definite rhythm), but I’d probably use the arranger like you mentioned.

Here’s what I did. Very basic use of the OT with a trig (just put a trig down, hit play, then removed the trig). But, I might do it differently if I had more pieces like this to play during a performance.

#4

This is what has scared me from this approach, but I think it could be useful, if careful :grin: