OT Sound Design : share your techniques

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

I saw a thread for general tips and tricks, but it’s mostly for utility/workflow. There’s a pdf floating around which also has a few sound design tips on it, but it leaves a bit to be desired.

So what are your go to tricks for vocal chops? Phaser fun? Resampling? Etc.

I take a sample and send an inv exp LFO to the rate (set it to ONE and have a pretty high speed, depth to taste) which makes it sound like a tape starting up.

Whenever I put chorus, flanger or phaser on a track I’ll send an LFO to the DEL so that it swooshes a bit more.

Here’s a fun one my friend showed me: Take the EQ and leave it as a PEQ. Take both gain knobs and turn them all the way down, and take both Q knobs and turn them all the way up or close to it. Now send one LFO to FREQ1 and one LFO to FREQ2 to get a real fun watery- phaser-like effect. You can of course vary the speed and shape of the LFOs for extra variation and weird swooshiness. Try this on a drum part or synth part… It sounds like Neon Indian :stuck_out_tongue:

12 Likes
#2

@defenestration does some amazing things with the OT on his YouTube channel. No sample synthesis, conditional resampling etc

8 Likes
#3

Last night I’ve had a play with looping MIDI out from the OT back into itself. This gives the MIDI capabilities of the OT as another modulation source which is fantastic. Just make sure that whatever note is present on the MiDI trig does nothing (or something else if you prefer)

For example, I can set the LFOs on the audio side of track 1 affect main page parameters (e.g. audio lfo 1 to filter cutoff, lfo 2 to reverb time, lfo 3 to pan).

Then the MIDI track LFOs can send Midi CC to affect Audio LFO speeds for each of them (i.e. MIDI LFO 1 to Audio LFO 1 speed etc). 6 LFOs per track! I need to check you can have more than that by using more than 1 MIDI channel to send CC to the same Audio track.

4 Likes
#4

Use a spectrum analyser on my computer to determine key frequencies and their corresponding encoder value for OT EQ. 70 =500hz :wink:

Emulate analogue drum sounds on one shot drum samples using LFO to pitch, AMP Attack, and any other parameters I like the sound of.

For Atonal basslines, take any sample, detune it loads. Add a comb filter and design a custom LFO to comb filter tune. Tweak to taste. Send the same custome LFO to sample pitch. Resample, cut slice place trigs, locks conditions etc.

For atmospheres, take any long sample add tons of reverb, resample, detune add delay, resample, add chorus and reverb stop resampling when happy :slight_smile:

4 Likes