OT Sound Quality & FX

enryo · 2015-03-09T16:55:07.000Z

OK, so I’ve been having a play and here’s what I’ve found out:

If I go to Project > Control > Audio and switch Cue CFG to studio, the volume of sample playback is improved through headphones (which is my preferred monitoring path at the moment), which gives the impression of better detailed audio, but is probably just higher dB effect.

EDIT: In this mode it looks like I’ve lost control of the levels of individual tracks???

Pan on individual instruments is working and I can get a full hard left or hard right pan. However, I am still unable to get stereo ping pong delay to work, or if it is working, the stereo spread is so minimal so as not have any impact at all and I can hear the full delay in both left and right headphone concurrently. (Again, I’m only monitoring through headphones)
If I set Track 8 as master the sound quality is really diminished, sound out of phase. At first I though this was this because there must be FX on track 8 affecting the sound, so turned these to ‘none’ and sound is still awful if track 8 is used as master.

EDIT: This only happens when set in Studio mode… so my guess is that it must be a phasing between studio and master signals both being sent to the headphones-out.

EDIT: 4. If I use 8 as a master and apply compression, I get lots of low beating artefacts with any useable ratio or threshold.

I’m sure, as a new user, there must be some (lots of!) user error going here… can anyone help?

bluewolfse7en · 2015-03-09T17:31:54.000Z

If I pan a track left then send it full into the Dly with ‘X’ enabled I get ping pong no problem.
If I drop sample with lots of stereo imaging into my DAW, Reaper, Renoise, Ableton whatever then compare it to the same sample in the OT the difference is negligible.
Yeah there’s a minuscule dip in the very high end, say 1dB at 8kHz but that’s about it!

Certainly nothing like you’re talking about & stereo width is spot on.

I’d start a new project, load a single stereo sample into a flex slot, place a single trig & see what that sounds like. No master track & make sure all effects are initialised. Hold fx button & press clear,(play).

If that’s still not right can you post a couple of audio clips. One as is & one recorded from the OT’s outputs.
Cheers

circumstance · 2015-03-09T17:55:04.000Z

If this is causing a difference in your headphone monitoring -

Project > Control > Audio and switch Cue CFG

then it sounds like the headphone mix is set to mix between cue and master rather than one or the other (on the mixer page, it’s the graphic slider on the far left).
Set it just to master then you won’t need to use your cue in studio configuration

In terms of sound/fx I’ve found the opposite. I actually really love the sound of the OT, there’s a tightness and punch to it that I don’t get from any of my DAW environments, especially on processing guitar.

FX wise you might want to look into parameter locks and neighbour tracks. One half of my OT is set almost permanently to a THRU input and couple of neighbour tracks so I can chain effects. Then I use parameter locks on each track to sequence the fx settings, the rhythmic control you get over movement and texture makes the effects really powerful (especially if you set each track to individual lengths for some polyrythmic fun).

but no, there is no ping pong delay. Once you add LFO control to parameters (pan, routing) you may not miss it

Zymos · 2015-03-09T18:02:30.000Z

So the manual and other users are lieing about the ping pong delay?

circumstance · 2015-03-09T18:11:41.000Z

I don’t think anyone is lying!
but different people may have different understandings/approaches of how to create a ping-pong delay
technically it’s just different delay times in different channels,
…even if there isn’t a dedicated ping-pong delay per se on the OT you could achieve this in numerous ways, (combinations of LFO control and thru or neighbour tracks would be my approach)

Zymos · 2015-03-09T18:17:41.000Z

Appendix B, page 12 “X sets if the delay will act as a ping-pong delay or not”.
So, the manual is wrong about this?

circumstance · 2015-03-09T18:20:16.000Z

as i said, we all have seem to have different understandings of what an actual ping pong delay is, and I seem to disagree with elektron

SB-SIX · 2015-03-09T19:01:07.000Z

Ping pong on the OT swaps the left and right channel on every repeat. If the original signal is centered, you won’t hear any ping-pong effect.

Zymos · 2015-03-09T19:13:44.000Z

Ah ha…

bluewolfse7en · 2015-03-09T19:28:19.000Z

This is why I said Pan to the left!

circumstance · 2015-03-09T19:31:06.000Z

dang, i just wrote a complicated and poetic post and my computer lost it… so here’s a brief version

in my book (which is hastily scrawled but has lots of pages) a ping pong delay is made up of two mono delays where the signal of one is fed into the other. These are panned to create stereo width and the effect of the sound ‘bouncing’ fro one side to the other (this was how you could achieve moving stereo delays before they were invented). Also the fact that the delays were independent you could create cascading delays by setting the times differently (the sound coming out of second delay would be that delay time plus the original)… or in other words imagine yourself playing ping pong against an olympic champion.

On the OT I would consider it a panning delay because you can’t a) control the width or b)change the delay times independently. And as SB-SIX says above if you send it a mono centered sound it seems to have no effect, this wouldn’t be the case if it was two hard-panned delays feeding into each other.

BUT as far as I know the term ‘ping-pong delay’ is not technically specific and refers only to the sonic effect. So if the sound makes you think of a ping-pong game then it’s a ping pong delay, no matter what I think

(p.s. if you do want to experiment with old school ping pong delays it can be achieved on the OT by setting up delays on different tracks panning them and feeding one into the other)

circumstance · 2015-03-09T19:41:56.000Z

yes, that and growing up in a time where a true stereo delay was a thing of great wonder that only BIG studios had,
whereas we had quite a few mono guitar delays kicking around.
Throwing myself into the OT over the past year or so has pushed me back to lots of old hardware methods and i’m enjoying the random cable/pedal plugging/unpluggin and creative problem solving it’s making me do. funny how something so digital has brought so much analogue back into my studio.

bluewolfse7en · 2015-03-09T21:02:24.000Z

""Baddcr"":

I see…

So a question of semantics rather than any actual problem.

Yeah I guess so.
What ‘Circumstance’ refers to I would call a tap or multitap Dly, ala the old Digitech TSR24.
Again confusing as ‘tap’ these days refers to tap tempo!
Back on point to the Op, if you pan your signal to one side & send it thru the Dly with ‘X’ enabled it should bounce from side to side! Call it what you like.
With all the other points you’ve made tho I’d suggest that there’s either a lot of plocks, modulation or scene activity going on or that your machine is knackered.
Where are you based? Be good to get another forum member to check it out if there’s anyone near by.

enryo · 2015-03-09T21:15:40.000Z

OK, so maybe it’s down to expectations and semantics, but I would consider this a stereo ping pong delay, done on a single mono snare, panned central in Logic:

Here are a few audio examples of what I’m experiencing:

Mono delay done on a single mono sample, panned central, on the OT: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjran7hhycxobdb/DELAYNOPINGPONG.mp3?dl=0
‘Ping Pong’ (X) delay on a single mono sample, panned central, on the OT:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d8ikiitg4dejqys/DELAYWITHPINGPONG.mp3?dl=0

Clearly not a proper ‘ping pong’ delay. Even on a mono signal (in fact especially on a mono signal), I’d expect any basic stereo ping pong delay to alternate between L and R on the delay. A ping pong delay in my book should effectively be two independent mono delays, repeating at different intervals panned hard L and hard R to create a stereo image. Even better if you can set the delay time per channel… but hey.

OT doesn’t appear to have what most people would consider a stereo ping pong delay. A ‘ping pong’ delay which doesn’t produce a stereo image on a sample panned central, isn’t a ping pong delay, it’s just a mono tape delay.

Now to compression:

Here are two short loops (like I said, very new to OT and haven’t managed how to set the record longer than a bar!!), one with compression, one without:

Beat loop without compression:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/azsfp5kcp9rhjnr/LOOPNOCOMP.mp3?dl=0
Beat loop with compression:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9ok0fquju1qjsw/LOOPCOMP.mp3?dl=0

Can you hear the weird artefacts the compression has introduced? It’s like a low rumbling or beating. Especially after the middle kick drum? And these aren’t extreme settings, and come into play at very low ratios and thresholds.

Any advice on what’s going here with the compression? It isn’t usable as it stands.

EDIT: After comparing some recordings of single samples on my Mac, I think the sound quality is equal. Maybe just not such a great headphone amp or headphone signal path on the OT or something?

Like I said, no doubt some user error going on here and love the creative stuff I’ve found with the OT, not moaning, just want to get around these little ‘quirks’, after all, not matter how creative a box allows you to be, the sound comes first…

enryo · 2015-03-09T21:30:29.000Z

[quote=“” bluewolfse7en""]

[quote=“Baddcr”]I see…

So a question of semantics rather than any actual problem.

[/quote]

Yeah I guess so.
What ‘Circumstance’ refers to I would call a tap or multitap Dly, ala the old Digitech TSR24.
Again confusing as ‘tap’ these days refers to tap tempo!
Back on point to the Op, if you pan your signal to one side & send it thru the Dly with ‘X’ enabled it should bounce from side to side! Call it what you like.
With all the other points you’ve made tho I’d suggest that there’s either a lot of plocks, modulation or scene activity going on or that your machine is knackered.
Where are you based? Be good to get another forum member to check it out if there’s anyone near by.[/quote]
Thanks, I’m just outside Bournemouth on the South Coast if anyone is near?.. but it’s probably just new user error I think I’ll do what I should have done when I first got the box and reset it to factory settings and clear everything.

(EDIT: Talking of clearing, apart from copying a blank track (which I may not always have), is there a quick and easy way to clear everything from a track? Machine, sample, patterns, plocks, FX, the whole lot in one go?)

Yeah, thanks, if I pan the original signal hard L or R, the stereo delay kicks in. But this effectively just sounds like the wet signal of what I’d expect a stereo ping pong to do if I had the original panned central.

So, with all this in mind. Is there a way to add a stereo delay / ping pong delay, whatever we’re calling it, like in my first example above, on a sample panned central, on the OT to give it a nice stereo FX width?

If not, no worries, would be nice, but not the end of the world

enryo · 2015-03-09T22:20:06.000Z

Thanks, yeah already tried that. Couldn’t get much out of it until I got past 32, but by that point it had affected the dry signal’s stereo position too much

reeloy · 2015-03-10T08:27:31.000Z

…i experience very sonic results with the ot…

…and we can’t discuss sound quality, if you seriously judge it while all you hear is nothing but a headphone amplification…

i say ping…you say pong…

avantronica · 2015-03-10T10:19:39.000Z

""henryoakley"":

Mono delay done on a single mono sample, panned central, on the OT

Afaik the OT doesn’t work with ‘mono’ samples, aren’t they sorta converted to stereo (or 2 channel) once loaded (all tracks are stereo)… Maybe a nuance which is clouding expectation. Fairly sure the ‘pingpong’ worked out as i expected. Curious to investigate again

clunky · 2015-03-10T11:00:53.000Z

""rozzbud"":

mmm…i’m a believer that the ot is indeed not a hifi or inyourface device. For me it is an instrument not an emu sampler for big beats or an apogee. It’s more a canvas for conversational layers between lofi textures and clean “loops”, weird auxiliary fx/organic stutters, unquantized beats vs martial step sequences.

Like a guitar, you have a sweetspot between polished on the grid playing and rough, clunky pick and finger errors recorded in the mix. I really think it takes time to coordinate the knowledge of the different effects combined with the texture of samples and the operation of the different machines.
It takes a while to find a creative method and imho it works in either a cut in sonic options and/or a more “mid-fi” approach that take you to this sweatspot.

in terms of quality, well it’s like a painting compared to a photo. It’s less accurate but it has more layers with signatures, gestures.

Of course if it’s about looping finished stuff or transparent playback that’s another problematic.
For some reason i only sample in 16bits.

Very well put.

avantronica · 2015-03-10T11:41:12.000Z

[quote=““avantronica””]

henryoakley:

Mono delay done on a single mono sample, panned central, on the OT

Afaik the OT doesn’t work with ‘mono’ samples, aren’t they sorta converted to stereo (or 2 channel) once loaded (all tracks are stereo)… Maybe a nuance which is clouding expectation. Fairly sure the ‘pingpong’ worked out as i expected. Curious to investigate again[/quote]
yep - the issue here is that you’re actually hearing a ping pong delay, but as the left and right channels are the same, you can’t easily tell (unless you adjust the balance (not PAN) - easy to verify with an obviously stereo sample, record a note on left channel and a different note with different dynamics on right at same time - then fire through the delay with default balance - if X (crossover) is off you’ll hear that the delay is true stereo, if X is on you’ll hear the echoes alternately swap sides - so the confusion is that you’re expecting the ping pong to work as a mono input ping pong would

if you adjust the balance on the stereo sample now, it’ll emphasise either of the notes and the ping pong will be even more obvious