It didn’t seem wise to start separate topics for these small things, so here they are all together.
I uploaded a scan of the LFO shapes page from the MonoMachine manual since the Octatrack uses the same shapes and triggers. The OT manual doesn’t have that page and sometimes I forget what One and Half do and whether they start on the positive or negative half of the waveform. I printed that page out and stuck it in my OT manual.
If the rate parameter is set to control pitch (not timestretch), you can pitch shift by octaves easily. If you have a sample playing a C5 note (for example) and rate is 63, dropping it to 32 will play C4, 16 plays C3, 8 plays C2, 4 plays C1, and 2 plays C0.
It is well known that if you are using a Pickup machine and you change the pitch control, you get the dreaded “overdub aborted” message. However, the OT does record the pitch drop for a brief period of time. Not so good if you want accurate reproduction of your input, very cool if you’re creating soundscapes or generating audio craziness. By manipulating the Pitch control you can get it to go in and out of recording/overdubbing and capture the shifted tails of sound.
Another Pickup machine quirk (I have to investigate this more to see what is really happening) – I always thought you had to manually initiate recording via the red Record buttons or via MIDI commands. However, today I was playing with the RLEN, QREC, and QPL setting and the Pickup machine would start recording, then overdubbing, then recording as the OT was running. I reset all those values to MAX, off, off and it was still exhibiting this behavior of auto-starting the recording process. Since there’s no triggers, it seemed that the pattern length had some factor in determining when recording started, when it dropped into overdub, and when it started recording again.
OK - followup on the pickup machine weirdness I noticed. This is most likely a bug, but it may be a bug we don’t want them to fix… EDIT … Of course I missed the obvious that you can already place recording triggers on a pickup machine.
If you use Rec triggers, the Pickup machine now acts like a Flex machine that does overdubs. It automatically starts recording where the Record trigger(s) were placed, and if they are one-shots, it stops recording and goes into play or overdub, depending on what trigger type you originally selected. You can also press Track+Yes to re-arm the one shot triggers.
I haven’t explored all the possibilities yet, but what it seems to come down to is that a Pickup machine is really a wrapper on their standard recording machines and just gives you a different interface for placing and removing Recording triggers.
ahhh so cool you figured this out! thanks. i accidentally came across that record trigs and pickup machines did something, i think while i was switching parts and using the trick of switching from pickup to flex to pickup, but i couldn’t figure what exactly was going on. i was like now
this’ll be nice to mess with if you can use it to do precise punch ins and outs. tbh, i wish you could set the flex machines to overdub mode, but this sounds like it’ll work well enough. gonna go play with it.
hmmm, if i load the same recorder in another track i’ll have to try pitching or changing the rate with locks and resampling/overdubing that.
Need an epic fadeout on a Pickup machine to end your set?
Changing the gain kind of works, but it’s not exactly the same as a smooth volume fade.
Go into the AMP setting and slightly move the REL knob to change it from INF to 127 or slightly less.
There you go - nice slow smooth fadeout.
Note - this appears to introduce an interesting bug (hence the ‘end of set’ preface). If you try to record something else on this track, it appears to record, but you never hear anything. Even if you put REL back to INF, recording appears to be hosed. You have to stop the OT and restart it to get it to record again. (you can probably ‘fix’ it by changing machine types and not stopping the OT, but I ran out of time this morning and didn’t try that).
It would be cool to be able to slowly fade a pickup machine in and out using the AMP envelope, but not yet.
i accidentally came across that record trigs and pickup machines did 
now 