That’s what I think
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I guess you’ve checked out Octachainer already? It takes a bit of manual work to set up all the slices… but definitely reduces your amount of samples. Once done, it’s pretty much fluid and clean. It’s the best way I found to move a complex project from Ableton to the OT - using 8 static machines for example. In this context, each bank is basically a “song” and each pattern a slice of that song (thus containing 8 different audio tracks).
That said, I think OT gets really fun when you start sampling stuff directly in it and actually get away from this cumbersome workflow; I can tell from experience. When sampling guitar or synths, I usually don’t even bother with timing or anything. You just sample free-floating audio material and organise it with the OT, playing with the start position and so on. It’s almost always magical!
Honestly, if I ever had to sell all my gear… I will sell everything but the OT. It’s a fantastic creative tool.
Good luck :)!
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Just prep your stems in the DAW properly first. Make sure the loop properly and don’t use the OT to time stretch if you can help it.
OT is a great substitute for a laptop but prepping for a live show takes a lot of work, I used to spend a couple of months making a set then gig with that whilst working on another
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
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thanks a lot dude! will deff check octachainer out!
I didn’t read all the replies, but have you looked into slicing up your samples and using loop points? In most of my tracks there are one or more synth lines that develop over time (for instance slowly opening the filter as a track develops). I do solo live shows and also play guitar so I simply can’t play eveything live on the spot, so for some parts I just load complete stems as a single sample into my OT and then chop them up in slices with loop points. That way each stem only takes up one track. You assign the different slices to trigger at the first step of the various patterns you use to build the track and the loop points make sure you have the flexibility to keep a pattern playing for a few times longer than in your original song arrangement before you move on to the next one (at least that’s how i work for now, haven’t figured out the arranger yet lol). I used to do stuff like this on an MPC1000 and I think the OT is way easier. OT will work with stems just fine. Hope this helps!
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This is interesting so you’re basically chopping up that long take inside of the octatrack? what i’m doing now is slicing everything beforehand in ableton but this might actually be much easier. thanks!
one more question for you unifono. Could you give me some insights / learnings you;ve gained moving from ableton to the octatrack? My ideal liveset would have improvised parts, but also prepared parts in stems from ableton. Like performing my own music, but free in form, depending on the situation. I haven’t really spoken to anyway who made the move from ableton to octa yet so im wondering what I could learn from your past experiences :)!
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Three linked linked posts from me. Hope that helps. Tell me if you have further questions
This a set I recorded last week. It‘s completely ableton style mixing of premade stems, applying fx, resampling and making transitions
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sweet, i actually modelled the base of my set on that post of yours thanks man. One question though, so how do you work with stems that are basically pads or sounds that evolve over a longer period than 64 steps. Even longer then when you adjust the pattern length settings (those 1/4, 1/2 settings). For example, a 5 minute evolving pad that doesnt really loop well when you cut it up in 8 bar pieces. I cant wrap my head around that.
Also, you load everything into static machines right? So how do you keep track of your stems? Doesnt that pool get really full at one point? Or does the pool empty with each bank? Also, how do you name your files?
Sick set btw man, just watched a long part of it. Really cool to see, you’ve got this thing down!
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There’s ‘plays free’ mode too, check that out, essentially like firing clips in Live. So you could fire off your long parts that way.
The Octatrack can be nice control centre / mixer for your live setup. Run the clock from OT to Rytm, plug your Rytm into OT. Maybe another box into the other two inputs.
Look up the transition trick - this is way you can sample your session live, transition to that loop, setup the stuff for the next part of the track, then crossfade back in.
Otherwise as others have suggested, use a methodical approach to bouncing your stuff out.
This could be naming things in a way that makes sense, and sticking to certain divisions/multiplications of time.
Stick with it man, what you’re aiming for is the OT’s bread and butter, you’ll get there 
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thanks bud
The OT is hard work. But eventually you will get there. Perhaps it is a good idea to first start on some new work on the OT.
You say you have many synths. Hook them up on the OT and sample material in them. Those long pads just let them run on the synth itself and alter the incoming audio from the OT. With this you create your own new liveset. In my opinion that is the fun with the OT.
Keep your other live set in Ableton and perform it from there and create new material with the OT itself. Creating is more fun then reorganizing. I tried something similar before. But it was so much more work and the result is less fun then the original work which I enjoyed so much. But then I started creating new music and that brought me fun back and let me learn the device while having fun.
Good luck!
put a radio on the inputs, drop a few trigs, set some scenes and go to town. it shines as a ‘science lab’ for weird experiments usually involving LFO abuse, scenes, resampling and FX.
thanks!
glad it helped.
Regarding files: I keep track of them by naming them in a specific way and by simply knowing them very well.
If I run out of static slots I fill flex slots. They work fine for 4 bar loops etc as well.
But the slots are the limit of my set. I simply bounce stems in a way I won‘t exceed available slots. For me, a full static slot list is a set of about one hour.
Regarding long evolving pads: I rarely have this case. If I had, I‘d use plays free track. Look that up. But generally I would avoid it.
Basically, for me it was possible to create a very similar version of my ableton set in the OT. But there are some constraints you just have to accept I guess. Sample slot limit, track limit, part limit. So for example if I need a different set of samples for one song, e.g. for intro, main part, break and outro I use the 4 available parts for that. But I simply keep it at 4 or less sections. I don‘t want to recreate the song exactly one by one anyway. 4 parts is enough for that purpose for me.
Of course ableton has many advantages, you are much more unmlimited in tracks, samples, fx etc. But the OT is still the most powerful hardware I know for my purpose. You get live realtime sampling/resampling instead, which enables seamless transitions and lgreat live manipulation options, while keeping your original source tracks untouched. you can jump back anytime.
And you get the magic crossfader scenes, which make up for a lot.
You can set up something similar in ableton of course, but the way the OT handles that stuff is unique imo, and perfect for live situations
But I admit, setting it up for the first time is headache. Much easier to do in ableton.
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Thought to take into consideration: If you trigger entire one shot stems you lose the organic timing of hardware clocks. If you’ve never tried it slave Ableton to one of your machines and watch the BPM vary over time. This is definitely a benefit that makes composing in your machines vs a DAW worth while.
Me personally? my setup looks like this:
- Machinedrum into inputs A and B, recorded by Recorder 1, played back simultaneously on Track 1.
- All synthesizers summed and into inputs C and D, recorded by Recorder 5, played back simultaneously on Track 5.
- Tracks 2 and 6 are neighbor tracks to add more FX to 1 and 5, respectively.
- Tracks 3, 4, and 7 are where I’ll play more traditional “samples” if necessary, but often they go unused. The key here is the live recorded material.
- Track 8 is master
- The first pattern for any Bank just plays back the input material straight.
- After that, I have a series of patterns with lots of trigs on tracks 1,2,5 and 6. These trigs chop up whatever is in the recording buffer at the time, punch in FX, do dramatic eq/filter gestures, reverse playback temporarily etc. I make liberal use of low probability trigs and long scale length to make these sequences highly varied over a long period of time.
- Some of these patterns have regular recorder trigs so the “latest” drum/synth material is always being fed into the recording buffers. Others have One-Shot trigs that can be armed with a single button press, so that the ‘raw material’ can be looped indefinitely or replaced on the fly. I can squeeze a lot of performance out of letting one of these patterns play and occasionally hitting the Arm button.
- At this point, what we’ve created is a series of “remix patterns” on the Octatrack that are applied to drum/synth work done elsewhere. There’s no audio files committed in the OT, just instructions about what to do to audio that comes in. As long as we have raw material to feed the beast, it will kick out dynamic, intricate sequences.
- Pick a completely different track from your library and feed it to the OT’s inputs. You have an instant remix of that track. Pick another one, do it again. Audition a dozen tracks and see which one jives with the sequence you’ve programmed on the OT.
- This is insane.
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I just purchased my OT last week so I am by no means an expert. I have a loooooong way to go before I’m anywhere near understanding everything it can do. So far though I find it to be an excellent centerpiece and hardware bus for my setup. I was previously doing Digitakt + Digitone jams with occasional support from my other hardware. Now I’m running everything through the OT for its effects and MIDI.
I’m also planning on moving some of my pre-made tracks to the OT. I don’t live shows (yet), but I’m sure I’ll inevitably butt heads with what you’re coming up against. We’ll see if my tune changes when that happens
That was a long-winded way of saying the OT is, IMO, extremely flexible. It can be so many things, all at once.
The topic has been discussed here on the forum a few times.
@movingsound check my post here: Preparing For First Live Show w/ Octatrack
Just take each track, export its’ stems of equal length, then chop it in OctaChainer to get even slices (‘Slice per X step of BPM’ mode), and upload it to OT.
Set up your OT project tempo to match Ableton’s project BPM.
Then set up the OT arranger to play consequence of patterns, so that every pattern triggers corresponding consequent slice of your stem, and repeat it for every track in the same way (I’ve got template for that, as mentioned in my post above).
This method empowers you to navigate the track without using one-shot trig mode, and you get enough room for manipulation, as you are tied to the grid. All you have to do is just simple math, calculating how many slices will fit into OT projects’ 256 patterns and thus selecting appropriate dimension in OctaChainer.
So far I have each of my songs in a separate project BUT you are free to fit up to four tracks into each project using variable OT arranger tempo + OT parts to change stem assignments.
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So does the OT have quantised cropping, you can crop to exactly 4 bars and create a slice there? Please be truue
I didn’t really read through all the responses, however it seems like you threw a lot at yourself at once with the OT. I’m sure plenty of people love playing guitar, but I’m certain everyone would hate playing non-stop and learning all it’s most difficult intricacies in the first weeks or month with it.
And the OT’s difficulty is in it’s depth of programming. So for me learning the processes was a mental shift. So, you really mentally can only take on so much at a time.
My recommendation is, while you’ve clearly gone hard on the OT to do your set in less time than you realized you’d needed to do all that you want with it comfortably. Especially when it comes to the OT system. It takes time to understand how to implement it’s various features and be acquainted w/how to do that and be able to do it comfortably, which in the case of the OT is just through repeatedly using/programming what you want to use.
So hopefully if your still behind where you thought you could be with it for your set, that you can work through it with help from these great people or at least get your set together and not toss the OT as a result of not getting where you wanted so quickly.
I don’t know ALL the OT features, but if your using pre-recorded material to playback in a set format scene’s are popularly known and great, but you may find that using the ‘Arranger’ could give you a more ‘set’ like format that doesn’t have you jumping hoops to string together loops and slice them, when you have 120 slots of samples per set, and you can ‘arrange’ in a massive arrangement what you want to play and when.
But yeah, there are plenty of options to do a set, so I can’t say you wouldn’t rather just attach stems to scene’s and have tracks with loops sliced to use in a performance way that is more simply a improvisational approach.
So yeah, the OT gives you a lot of options. So I hope you’ve found some advice to figure out an approach that works with what you’ve familiarized yourself with already as that will likely be your best approach rather than throwing more features for you to learn with just a little bit of time.
So I don’t know if the ‘arranger’ will be your best option, but it does give you a more linear way to format a set rather than the for mentioned. Hope that’s of use to you if not now, maybe at another time when you can explore it’s options and approaches.
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