this might be obvious, but i only worked it out the week and was completely astounded the octatrack could handle it…
I used to have all my stems bounced out as separate wav files, but I eventually filled up the 128 slots for static samples.
my stems are either 32 or 64 bars …
anyway, i went back into ableton and then just lined them up 1 after another and bounced 1 file with the 4 parts playing one after another… as you would with sample chains for kick drums, just with 40second stems…
then on the OT just set the triggers with start point at either 0, 32, 64, 96 and it just plays them back perfectly
to my astonishment, the octatrack can manages to stream all 8 tracks off a CF card in realtime, and keep them perfectly all in sync even tho its accessing the 2 different 256bar wav files and from 8 different parts of the file.
i know thats the point sample chains, but i would have assumed that it was more designed for short samples like drum kicks etc… not streaming back 64 bar loops
anyway, in the end for every song I ended up reclaiming 3 static slots…
This sounds great! Is there at all a limit to how long the stems can be (just the size of the CF card?)? I’m imagining trying to build up a live set like this, but splicing together many stems from several songs. Would be awesome to try to crossfade between various scenes and build up a more “alive” live set that way.
I also play this way with my band. minimum of 4 max of 7 stems (track 8 is a click track) for song sliced in 16, 24, 32, or 64, slices. then I program each slice per pattern (ex: pattern 1 all track will be slice 1 and so on). In this way I can playback a full production made on Ableton or any other DAW and at the same time be free to improvise, mangle the samples, etc… love it!
the band have some videos on youtube, but it don’t show my setup close (baiana system is the name of it)…
this is by far the most reliable setup I ever play. never feel insecure… when I use to perform with ableton, my life was only stress!
the way I setup it is: I change the time signature in ableton to 64/16 so I can see more clearly the slice division that is gonna work best. and then I calculate for each part of the song, the sequencer length. it is almost always 64 with some division, some times 1/2 or 1/4… some times when the music have a big session 1/8. Some times the music have a weird length, for exemple 40 steps with 1/4 division… on my OT setup I play in arrange mode, it it helps with the form of the music some times… all show in one single arrange session. works great. and I can jump in and out of the mode freely.
In OT I just have to put the trig on the firth step and param lock the slice that will play, some time I put more then one slice per pattern, for ex: on a pattern with 64 steps and 1/4 division, I put slice 1 on the trg 1 of the firth page, then slice 2 on trg 1 of second page and so on… I copy and past the trigs to the other tracks and then I move next pattern.
oh also, if you have it stretch over 2 patterns (i.e. if you are using a 64 bar loop per part)
then on pattern 1 your slice points will be 0, 32, 64 and 96 … but on pattern 2 you need to move them to 16, 48, 80 and 112 as they need to move forward to the second half of the 64 bar loop…
its just the limitation of the OT that I can only playback 32 bars at at a time…
ok basically most of my set is based on 64 bar sections… essentially 2 minutes of a track built in Ableton.
but as I am using TRK 4 and TRK 8 as THRU input for the RYTM and A4, it leaves me only 3 stems for each song I load up.
3x64 bars is 192 bars… but for the bpm and the start points to play nicely, the entire loop needs to be 256 bars long… thus I either throw silence in there, or lately I have also been putting variations in…
does that make sense?
the upside to doing it like this is that all my patterns have the same triggers, so I can mix and match which of the samples I load in and it automagically already works…
has to be one of these lengths tho, 2, 4 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 etc…
I did this for my first OT gig last week. Took stems from all my tunes on the MPC Touch. Had to render a few together cause of the amount of tracks/parts on the OT. But i fit a 10 song set on a proj before i ran out of sample spots in the pool. It was great cause the OT can do way more improv oriented things than the MPC can. BUT the MPC is 100x better at organization/song building. So the combo has been so much fun. Plus a lil op1 on the side
Bumping this great thread as I recently stumbled upon the same idea for the same reasons, while wanting to bring in my various Model:Samples tunes, as individual stems.
Afterward, it seemed so obvious! I was sure I wasn’t the only one, and so I found this old post in my searches.
Between MS tunes and old multitrack recordings, I have a lot of material and didn’t want to run out of static slots. I like to keep things in one project for live performance, as much as I can
Calling them “stem-chains”, I kind of documented my own workflow in this multi-slide Instagram post.
In my case (heh… techno) the total chain is much more concise. 16 bars.
The individual stems themselves, within that 16 bar chain, range from 1 bar to 4 bars per part.
This encourages me to do more interesting things on the OT with the stems. Resequencing the material, remixing it, reimagining it. Allow myself to really work with it on the OT in real-time.
Combined with fills that allow for some classic reverse audio tricks (negative rate playback parameter), stuff we used to only be able to do in post with Soundforge or Acid Pro, well let’s just say it makes using the OT as fun as ever.
Since I am also using Ableton to lay out my stems, I also use it as an opportunity for some harmonic saturation processing with the aim of a more finished and polished sound coming out of the Octatrack.
Of course there are many other ways you could approach this. Some that include more traditional stem mixing, like a multitrack DJ set, and some that are more complex.
And yet again it amazes me with how many ways we can harness the power of the Octatrack. Limitations like 128 static slots aren’t roadblocks, but detours to interesting alleys, where we get to go off and explore, discovering new ways to reimagine our own music along the way.
Also, I’ve taken the liberty of changing the title of the thread from “Stems trick” to “Stem-chains trick” as I think it is a descriptor that will invite more folks into the discussion. Perhaps folks who use stems or chains, but haven’t considered ways to marry them together
Your workflow is exactly how I started using OT when I first bought it. The idea being that I could stem chain my entire ableton live set for gigs, and use the OT instead.
That was a long time ago.
One thing I like doing lately is making a new loop out of the sample chain, with whatever FX and modulations etc, resample that loop, then that frees up the 2 FX slots. Since the new loop is now a single sample… it frees up lots of trigs to use as conditionl trigless trigs for FX fuckery.
Essentially constantly recycling a limited source yeilds unlimited results.
Yeah, this is a great trick…I looked at your Insta post, and wondr why you are doing it this way. The way I was thinking would be to either- split the song into multiple parts (stems and then use octachain to make a chain…or just manually cut the song up in the OT editor, into slices of your liking.
What kept m from the latter is knowing where the bars started whn you get further into the song.
But I see using a DAW and doing the work there…Yeah thats a great idea.
