Purchase Octatrack in 2019?

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#166

Regarding OTs ‘track limit’ - When I got the machine, I was constantly running out of tracks and I was using OT as a drum machine mostly.
Using master track or not was a big issue…

About a year ago (or so), I set myself a goal; I wanted to produce tracks on OT, AK, Shruthi and Micromonsta only. No external fx, just those boxes.
Had to dive deep into OT fx first, because OTs fx just sounded lame and it took quite a while of finetuning, but eventually it worked out great!

There’s so much character hidden there. Somewhere.
Dark Reverb can sound so lush…

There are a few very helpful threads in this forum about OTs gain structure, how to gain stage properly etc. Basically these threads were the reason I joined the forum…
So, yeah…I learned a lot during this time, nowadays I’ll usually just record 2x stereo out from OT (drums+thru machines) and stereo out from AK and I sometimes even have spare OT tracks (!) Totally nuts…
So…don’t throw the machine against the wall, usually there’s a way to do it in the OT.
It won’t make coffee, but usually you can find a way to implement your requirements.

And since we got conditional trigs in the OT as well, (so amazing they managed to implement TRCs!) even more complex midi arrangements are possible :slight_smile:

I read the manual twice before I bought my OT, also read Merlins guide and bookmarked stuff on forums…that made it definitely easy, never had the promised what the fuck?!? moments or any desire to kick the thing from the table. :slight_smile:

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#167

I’ll chime in by saying if one goes into their OT experience with a sense of finding limitations and things it can’t do they will find a list of them in the first few weeks and months and may want to even post about them to point them out. If one goes into their OT experience open to give it time, learn its ways, and not doubt its capabilities until @sezare56 says it’s not possible (which rarely happens), one will find it does much more then they imagined. Ironically following the second option most likely will yield solutions to do all or at least most of what following the first option would have declared a shortcoming.

Also having studied the OT for several years learning its parameters, functions, how it operates, and how it’s layers interact with each other, I’m able to grok what it might be capable of even if I haven’t personally put in enough programming time and practice to make it do what I can see it being able to do. And I’ve never seen anything on the internet even come close to its potential…

12 Likes
#169

Yer it’s OT for short.

#170

I have no real opinion about whether or not to use laptops. As a rule they kinda rub me the wrong way for myself. But I love Nicolas Jaar who’s an Ableton/laptop savant. I don’t feel any sense of snobbery about it, I just prefer recording music on a computer and making music on hardware.
Since purchasing my Octatrack a year ago I’ve added an A4 mkii, MicroMonsta and 7U 104HP modular rig to my setup. If I were forced to choose only one of em it would be the OT, which was WAY cheaper than my eurorack. It’s all about finding the right instrument for yourself, I suppose

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#171

Its quite reasonable to be hoping for a more high-tech implementation of the OT. In fact, theres a huge thread about it already on this board… But just see what you can do with the current OT incarnation, you might be pleasantly surprised at what its capable of! The specs belie the ingeniousness of the whole…

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#172

The post from @Schnork said “yes”, I would like to disagree and say “no”, if I didn’t misunderstand the question … why …

We have two machines for playing samples.

  • The “Flex-Machine” needs to load samples into RAM and works from there. Because the amount of samples in RAM is quite limited and because all flex-machines have to share the same storage space, we can only load a limited amount of audio.
  • The “Static-Machine” streams audio directly from the mass storage (flash-drive).

Generally speaking both machines can do quite the same with samples. The static-machine is not supposed to play-back samples only. Most of the sample-mangling functionality is available too. Slicing, time stretching, pitch shifting etc. is possible.

Here a link to a post discussing differences …

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#173

A good decision … in one of your posts you said, that you also worked on the experimental side. IMO the OT is a great instrument for those tasks too.

I would say that the OT is an instrument making many techniques of Musique Concrete available without the tedious workflow or special gear of the past :wink:

#174

Octatrack is fucking great. In 2019 or otherwise. I dont get the relevance of what year it is. There’s no competitive instrument other a daw like Ableton or bitwig.

I got a basically-new mk2 for £700 a few weeks ago and it’s completely inspirational, I love it. I’m trying to figure out and decide out my approach, it’s capable of so much that you have to be clear what you want from it or you get in a muddle.

4 Likes
#175

I prefer the original Blinkenlite, I had the expansion board which makes it a Blinkenlite Plus Pro. It has its quicks and shortcomings (especially the 2x2 pixel screen) , but even if only half of the 32bits are floating internally, it has a character of it’s own that the newer models fail to reproduce. It definitely sounds warmer. Sold it to fund an Octatrack, though.

#176

Definitely. I mangle the hell out of long static samples. I use slices on them, megabreak of doom style using the crossfader, several static machines at once, or whatever comes up. I never tried but I don’t see a reason why we couldn’t s-lock samples on a track with a static machine. I read something about " lazy programming" earlier on. My opinion after 6 months of intensive use is that the code is very efficient. The real-time performance is amazing, still in 2019.

#177

Just an educated guess … switching samples in a track means switching audio sources. I think that’s why we have to load those samples into RAM. IMO it makes a difference whether I find a short sample inside my RAM and can swap with very low latency, or I have to go to another huge audio file or stream, find the exact position there, read it out and play it back …

AFAIK RAM and mass storage devices are quite organised differently. RAM can address every byte directly, storage devices go via directory, file name, relative position to start of file etc. Maybe that’s the reason why. :thinking:

#178

Pretty sure sample locks on static machines work.

All sampled loaded into the sample slot list can be used for sample locking.

Btw, I think he initialy asked if all the other tracks can be used without any limits if one track streams a large sample or if there were any restrictions.
Definitely yes.

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#179

yes that works

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#180

In the case of the OT it is much more optimized, because the OT uses only “pre-known” files (you need to register them in the static sample list). This way it can cache quite some stuff about a file like its low level address.

Nevertheless it is still an external medium and there are no guaranteed limits to the latency between a data request and its fulfillment. In most cases it is fast enough (like for streaming) but it may happen that the data is late - especially when performing many jumps in a short period of time.

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#181

Yep, just checked with the manual. The part describing the differences between flex and static machines does not mention sample-locks (section 11.1).

Good to learn new things every day :smiley:

1 Like
#182

Ah yeah sure it works! Before we got conditional trigs, I tried to work with rendered synth pads and chord progressions for a short while, because I had a hard time to do more complicated chord progressions with OTs midi tracks.
Kinda like backing tracks.
I used sample locks and also slices that were looped at the end, sometimes sample start modulation to get more liveliness etc.
Besides the madness of arming one shot trigs everytime before switching patterns it worked perfectly!
No hiccups or anything like that.

Btw, pitch modulation can sound amazing on pads rendered with fx! Actually I forgot to bypass the fx chain before rendering, but it turned out really nice^^

2 Likes
#183

There’s a big technical (coding) difference between streaming from disk and having a sound loaded into RAM. So it makes sense the OT distinguishes between the two and has different feature sets.

The primary distinction is rather obvious. With a sample loaded into RAM, the entire duration and extent of the sound is known ahead of time. One can run static processes to determine peaks and troughs, average loudness etc. But with a streaming sound, the software cannot know when it will end, or other qualities of the sound as a whole.

The mythical Blinkenlite 4000 TM has tons of RAM and a fast processor that allows realtime processing of multiple channels simultaneously. It can stream in a drum break, identify zero crossings, slice into beats, store to a second memory buffer (a transparent operation unknown to the user), and then seamlessly continue playing once the stream has finished, synchronised to whatever new BPM is active.

This is all entirely possible. Not sure if any device does it at the moment.

#184

Not only is the OT still relevant in 2019, I only wish I would have found it 10 years ago. I’ve only had OT mkI for 2 months and I am making the best music I’ve ever made. And having a great time with it too. I love threads like this that let me discover new ways of using this awesome device. Enough talking about music though, I’m hitting the studio to continue my recent masterpiece. :cool:

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#185

As my original post made clear, I knew about certain limitations and certain cool features of the OT, but wanted confirmation or alternative advice. I would just like to thank everyone who responded in that same spirit of inquiry. An OT is now purchased from a happy seller on this very website… because I wanted to keep it in the family, so to speak.

We will see how that works out, but at least now I am going in with realistic expectations.

I may lurk here on the forum and hope to contribute more. But I have a tendency to avoid too much online chatter and instead make music / conduct research / hang out in pubs.

Speaking of which. I record for Silent Records (USA) as 7PRS. I have performed the album Division by Zero as a live set with accompanying visuals, which have independently been in film festivals.

I record for Stolen Mirror (Ireland) under my own name, and occasionally produce and release other artists. Here’s a brand new video I made for Mai 麦, an artist based in China. I also produced all the music.

I won’t bang on about myself but figured some context was likely overdue. Almost everything I do can be heard for free, which is why I never locked myself into any major recording contract.

(If this is taken as too much self-promotion, I can delete.)

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#186

Enjoy the journey. With patience and being chill when you can’t work out why something is doing another thing you will go far with an OT! And when it clicks? Magical.

1 Like