Hey! Ah so you mean you can spread the pad over several trigs on the OT and adjust micro timing and they’ll play over eachother? I see what you mean though that the OT is 4x poly for triggers per step but yeah how that turns out depends on the synth. Must see if there are any vids about with OT and rev2
Hey Mike…I was using my digitakt yesterday for a bit and definitely after seeing what the OT can do it is a quite stripped down experience. More a sample based drum machine than a true sampler etc
You still have multiple midi tracks available on the OT and the DT, so don’t get too hung up on 4 voice polyphony. You can just use two or more midi tracks that send on the same midi channel.
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Pads often have long releases. The OT will neccessarily emit a note-off message within the same trig window as the initial note-on (because it’s a step sequencer). (EDIT: I’m not entirely sure of this, in grid mode yes, but maybe in live recording mode maybe we can have note-offs spread out over trig windows) The note-off message tells your synth to end the hold section of the envelope and start the release section. If the release is long, it’ll overlap the next trig(s). But the release section, unlike a delays, echos and reverbs, is part of the synth voice because it’s still synthesised.
Say you play a 4 voice chord with a long release patch on 1 OT trig, and a second 4 voice chord on the next trig and your synth is 8 voice polyphonic (and you’re not layering voices inside the synth itself) then on the 3rd trig you’re out of polyphony and if you play a sound here, the synth will steal voices from the 1st trig, interrupting the envellope. Which voice it’ll steal first, depends on th synth’s algoritm to handle that: the simplest is FIFO stealing, but more advanced synth might take other criteria into account (lowest velocity, trying not to steal the fundamental…)
Can be very tricky… I have a softsynth that displays the voice count, it uses hybrid sample/oscillator tech and does velocity layering. On long pads I frequently end up with a count of 64 voices though I only play 3-note chords.
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Interesting points! Rev2 has its own internal step sequencer … I wonder if a single trig from OT could interact with the Rev2 sequencer?
Hi! I have a similar setup like you have in mind right now (OT, A4, Rev2) and I thought I’ll put my 2 cents.
TL;DR: I would get A4+Rev2.
I use the OT mainly for MIDI and drums/percussion, the A4 does bass/drums/leads and the Rev2 pads/leads. In principle the OT can do anything and has more than enough tracks for me, but I don’t like working with samples for elements which are essential to the sound I’m trying to create (I’ll not explain why here because it would be too long and off topic). So, for me the OT has the role of filling the gaps in my sound. A4 also can do anything, but if I would make a pad sound with it I’ll probably use all 4 voices and I would only have 1 “essential sound” available. If I only use it for bass/drum/synth I have 4 “essential sounds” because it is multitimbral which gives me a lot more flexibility. In my original setup (A4+OT) the OT was doing the “broad” sounds like pads via samples, but I wasn’t happy because I realized that pads actually are very essential to my sound. Which is why I recently picked up a Rev2. The Rev2 is bitimbral which means that you can get 2 different sounds out of it using a single patch (which is one of the main reasons I picked the Rev2 over the peak), with 4 or 8 voices each. Now I have 2 more ‘essential sounds’ available in my setup and I’m very happy with my setup right now. The only thing I might add in the future might be a drum machine like digitakt or rytm to have even more flexibility such that the core setup I’m aiming for would be DT+A4+OT+Rev2. In principle my setup would also work as DT+A4+Rev2 as DT also plays samples and does MIDI. It has 2 less inputs though and I’m not sure if the midi tracks can play at different (1/2 or 1/4) clock speeds, which is very important for me. Let me explain. For some reason my bass and chord progressions are mostly 8 bars instead of 4 bars which would correspond to the default 64 steps if your sequencer “resolution” is 1/16. With the A4 sequencer you can set the scale to 1/2 or 1/4, but only for all tracks at the same time, which means that if my A4 does hats and bass I have to choose to either play only 1/8 hats or only have a 4 bar bass progression. I’m sure that there are workarounds using the arpeggiator in the A4, but it would be a hassle. I haven’t used the 2 sequencers in the Rev2 very much. The gated sequencer is very nice for sound shaping, but I don’t think I will ever make much use of the poly sequencer. Simply, because I also only have the desktop version so the only way of programming the poly sequencer would be either menu diving which is a real pain in the neck on the Rev2 or playing it on my OT, but then I can also directly record into the OT. Also editing notes on is so much easier on the OT.
I hope this helps.
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Then I would use the OT for hats maybe… it has scale per track. Just a suggestion that can come in handy: I use delays to complexify hats and snares. You can get incredibly realistic hat and snare beats with just 1 trig and a well chosen delay setting. In your case, you can play 1/8 hats and then set a synced delay with a single repeat, the result is 1/16th hats. But you should, for example try out 1/4 hats and a delay with a LFO that modulates feedback. There’s a truckload of tricks available in the OT!
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I think the OT has two types if users. The ones that love exploring and creating crazy sounds. And the ones who use it as the central hub of their equipment as a sequencer etc. I dont think it is the one ruler of all thang. But it comes close.
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Then I would use the OT for hats maybe… it has scale per track.
Yeah, I almost always do that. Is there any other Elektron device which has this feature? Sometimes I like doing hats on the A4 because you can easily create a sound which is somewhere in between a snare and a hat for example and you can morph between them using parameter locks, envelopes and LFO’s.
And I love it for that and its unpredictability! Just sometimes when I’m looking for some very specific sound it feels like I spend too much effort to end up where I wanted to go.
I used to use this trick in the Monomachine, to get both snare and hats on one track (there’s only six tracks, after all). add delay to the hi-hat trig on one step, with no feedback and the timing obviously set just right. then add snare on another step with no delay, and you get snare and hi-hat together on that second step.
I’m the former. I have about sixteen synths midi-ed up and it’s the hub to sequence all of them. in fact, I only use audio from it about every third track or so. I had my days where I explored the depths of it though, and basically all sounds were coming from it. I’ve moved on, and it moved with me.
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I’m in a constant quest for reproductable unpredictability 
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Regarding hats, lower scale, etc… OT also has “trig count” in the micro timing page, it will repeat trigs up to 8 times equally spaced between steps. Available on midi tracks (and audio) and can be used with tracks at lower scale.
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I certainly do both… 
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OT’s unpredictably becomes more and more predictable as you use it, it’s all logical, unless you just go crazy tweaking without knowing what your doing, which can be tons of fun too! 
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Hey Ande! Great rundown of your aims and logic to get there! Essential sounds is a good focusing concept also for looking at what one truly wants vs needs. But I wanted to comment on your setup and lay out some concerns I have going forward. These center really around having loads of different boxes live …as my hunch is that I’d rather have a simple setup that goes deeper e.g. OT on drums, samples and sequencing the Rev2 … I also sing using the Roland VT4 which is an awesome device btw…
What do you think? Is a multi box setup something the brain gets used to over time?
When I get my OP1 back I will explore this setup properly and can live record into DT with my keystep so it’s not too plodding.
The key issue is lacking song mode the DT still feels like Im operating more than playing. Plus after looking more into what the OT can do the DT feels simple …as a drum machine perfect but in my central box goal the OT can do that and more + with song mode
Seems like I just need to buy the fecking thing. However any experience here folks porting songs from DT to OT?
We started going all Octatrack on you but I’ll say the DT seems pretty awesome for what it is, and the OT’s a bit of a challenge to learn. It takes some time and perseverance to wield one, it certainly does a lot more stuff but with that it takes much longer to get the hang of, you got to be up for it. It’s been known to drive some people crazy in the first few months or so. It’s super geeky… 
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Hey Mike , how does the OT deal with starting off with an arranged project but wanting to then jam out and improv say at the end? The main reason I moved away from laptop as backing track was that lack of flexibility. I have a guitarist playing with me and balancing structure with jamming is our ethos
I barely ever use the arranger or song mode, I mix and match patterns between boxes for improv jams. Haven’t really looked into it… I think you can just jump in and out of arranger…
This changes things. Your voice could be a lead, which makes the A4 as a lead synth less important. Drums can also be done entirely with your DT, so also this would also be covered, such that the only exclusive use case (from my perspective) of the A4 would be Bass. In this situation I would probably also rather go for OT, because you get an awesome loop box on top, which you can use together with your voice and you can also use the Rev2 for bass.
This is a bit tricky. The elektron boxes luckily have a very similar workflow. I started out with only an A4 and then added an OT about 6 months later and at least the basics did feel very similar (I suspect the same would hold if you are familiar with a DT). So, it is not like learning the functionality of 2 different instruments. The Rev2 is pretty much knob per function, so there is not very much for the brain to get used to and which is great for live situations. I think I can handle the functionality of the 3 boxes in a live situation although I have to admit, I wouldn’t be able to sing at the same time. The main problem I’m struggling with is to remember what parameters would be nice to tweak in a live situation. There are some helpful things like the performance macros on A4 or the scenes on OT, but you still have to remember what it means to go from scene A1 to A2. My low tech solution to that problem so far is to write these things down on a piece of paper.
I still am confused by my OT MKII tracks lit red when active, while on my Digitone red means muted 