Whenever I do this the resulting recorded audio always ends up sounding wrong, chopped up or warbly. always randomly different.
Also, am I correct that there’s no way to save the pre-sliced recorder buffers when you power down? IE, every time you want to use the technique you need to reslice a buffer first?
I am going to do some experimenting this evening…
I feel like it might be a case of recording “silence” and then slicing this blank audio to create an "empty but not " grid as a starting point.
my source for the info was Datalines video
ohpefully he can shed some more light on it.
Yes, you can SLICE up the Record Buffers without recording anything into them. Try it and then record something which is in time. Should work.
I believe what Tarekith describes is because of what Dataline suggests. It must be in time, the bpm used when creating the slices must be set in the same time as the master bpm. Otherwise you get the messy sounding slices when you re-record.
(This was one of my a-ha moments with the machine.)
Thanks, I’ll give this a try when my OT gets back from repair.
I checked with HQ…
when i did my testing with pre-slicing… it worked out fine… but some day
I started playing with bpm-changes…
the slices are absolute… and not relative…
thats why if you sample stuff… and your buffer was sliced at 128bpm.
and you re-record something in it at 136bpm… the slices go all wrong.
I wanted to put a request in for relative slicing… or yet another recording-option
record + slice … so i didnt need to reslice all the time… but havent come up with a “simple” solution i would like and use myself… (I like the idea…but not how to implement it… got lost in when relative should change to absolute… )
Its a shame though… cause it basicly means, you cant have realtime record something in pattern 1… and play with the slices in pattern 2 & 3 & 4… have a difrent song in difrent bpm. do transitioning trick in pattern 5 and play with slices in pattern 6 & 7 & 8.
well you can… but you have to reslice after recording and well that extra step was very confusing… even after practicing with it… i got a bit sick of it… so stopped that aproach
(which sucks) … I kinda thought that was the whole deal with this dynamic performance sampling…
you can save a sample in your recorder slot and have it automagicly load in there on startup… its to be found in the file-save dialogs. cant remember exact place…
but i am very sure (95-99%) i did it a few times
For those of us who frequently sample improvised instrumental phrases into the record buffers (eg. sampling a guitar, violin, or whatever being played in real time via a pickup machine), the bolded phrase above is key, along with the_dreammer’s comment about the slice positions being absolute rather than relative. In short, the pre-slicing technique doesn’t work for us, because the length of the recording in the record buffer will always change from performance to performance.
The preslicing technique seems to work best for audio that will always be the same every time.
I tried using the Octatrack in a structured rock band situation yesterday and I just couldn’t sample and then play back slices of the sample fast enough - the song is already half over by the time the slice playback is read. This ties in with the advice that I received on the older forum that some stuff on the Octatrack just has to be prepped in advance of the performance - not all things can be improvised on the fly in that kind of structured situation.
The feature requests on the Feature Request Thread regarding the slicing functions would be a big help to those of us to regularly sample our live guitar/violin/whatever playing into the Octatrack. I was able to get away without these features in experimental/ambient settings where tight timing and structure is not needed.
You learn something new everyday 
I always thought the slices were relative.
me 2…
I found out by accident… first i thought it was a bug or something i hit on by accident…
so i wrote elektron to make sure…
This technique works really well with slice kits. I always record my sample chains at the same BPM so when I slice one all the others fit the slice grid. Makes changing kits pretty simple.
Sorry. I know this is a year old thread but I just got my machine, followed the youtube video posted at the top of this thread and the basic problem I’m having is that pre slicing a recorder track to any grid value (i.e. 4, 16, etc.) only gives me one slice. If I fill the buffer with audio, slice it, and then refill it with new audio it works fine. Just curious what I’m doing wrong and any help would be appreciated.
very old thread, but I get the same problem. Only one slice on an empty pre-sliced rec buffer.
What is the solution?
You need to have a sample recorded into the buffer, can be silence of you want, slice that and then rerecord into the buffer.
There’s a bug introduced in OS 1.25H where the sliced buffers won’t remain after power cycle, perhaps saving the buffer and assigning to self will retain them.
many thanks to you
Start points work well for pre-slice remix of empty buffers. They change dynamically with tempo whereas if you slice a buffer, change bpm, and rerecord it will sound wonky…
Here’s a relavant topic/post:
thanks for the important tip. The only drawback I see is not being able to use the Slices trig mode grid as I like to. But I’ll keep that in mind for its dynamically adaptive advantage
Slices trig mode works with start points (SLIC off) equivalent to a 64 slice grid. 
Brilliant!
Pre - Slices works with 1.31. Save samples.
Slices are messed up if you record shorter, and you have to keep the same tempo.
Start mode main advantage : not dependant on tempo.
Slice mode main advantage : you can loop each slice. In start mode the whole sample is looped. For both you can use LEN=TIME to make shorter loops.
Other Slice mode advantage : you can use lfo on slice more easily (doable with start / lfo designer).