OT gig reports: unusual venues, different uses, tips, etc

I’d like to start a thread for nonconventional OT gig reports, with people helping each other out. if we ever get stickies, hopefully this thread can be valuable enough to become one.

Here’s mine:

So most of the people on here who gig with the OT seem to do so in an EDM context. Last night I had a chance to be part of a concert lineup in a school of music. It was only a 7-minute piece (a live version of “I Can’t” from my EP), but still, a great opportunity to expose my music to a completely different community, including some very important academic composers with whom I wouldn’t normally talk music. The great thing about these contexts is that you’ve got an attentive audience who are willing to put up with very difficult listening. You’ve also got a great sounding room. Of course, there were also people there who aren’t hip to, you know, repeating rhythms and melodies and stuff most people associate with music.

Anyway, it was my first OT gig (I’m normally a bass guitar player in public) and I was really pleasantly surprised at how well it went. I took advantage of the machine’s bias toward improv and sketched out some things but didn’t even know how the piece would end.

I was surprised, for instance, that in the end for a single track, I only used one pattern and modulated everything through scenes, the keyboard function, and real-time twiddling of knobs, manual fades, messing with tempo, etc. (the piece is fairly ambient to start with rather than following an A-B etc structure). It worked really well and seemed to create interest for audience members (or maybe they were just being nice, but for those who knew me as a scholar, there was a look of genuine surprise on their faces).

One thing I realized hanging around with the music school types is that the OT has another dimension we don’t normally exploit. Because of its ability to modulate repetition in real time (moving things off a beat-regular grid during playback, for instance–a feature really missing from Live) it’s a natural for reinterpreting old tape music and phase music where small changes in playback become the basis of the movement in the piece.

Anyway, I just wanted report on this possible use of the OT, and a different way of thinking about it.

If any of you are performing with the OT outside of EDM contexts, it would be great to hear about it. In general, I’d love to hear more from people’s actual gigging experiences and how they perform.

Best,
–JES

Glad your performance went well! Do you have a recording of this live version? Are there any particular tricks you made use of that led you to feel the way you did about the performance or was it just the culmination of the methods you listed? How much of a framework was in place before you started - like existing samples, trigs/locks, etc

Great topic!
I’m new to the Octatrack, and purchased my unit to do completely different projects than EDM - or anything like it.
(Not that I dont enjoy making or listening to EDM.)

But I’m using my OT to do installation projects, film soundtracks, interactive video, etc - and anything I can stretch it to do outside of its intended purpose.
I’m using it as a creative box that has very little to do with BPM’s, loops etc.
Where the OT works as part of a collection of synths, software, hardware, ipads, acoustic instruments, recording studio equip like tape machines, compressors, vintage valve equipment, radio station gear, Eventide H8000fw, tape delays, spring reverbs, audio to midi convertors, multi FX etc.
The output being nothing like what the machine was designed for.

I have no desire to use it for its intended purpose, and am pushing it in new directions.

So - I’m very keen on this topic.