nfim
2
I know the feeling, but I think the octa naturally lends itself to breaking out of this rut.
My suggestion: You have 16 patterns, 16 scenes and 4 parts in a song. As you fill them, you’ll start figuring out a performance to it: which crossfader movement here, how to transition to the next bit here… Now the track is half-finished, you go through it a couple of times to learn these performance bits, and then maybe solidify them in the arranger if you want to keep it in hardware, or at this point record to ableton. Just as a stereo mixdown at first, then start arranging by bringing in more elements from the octa if necessary. Overdub vocals and guitars, compress, excite, done.
I think you might be throwing stems into ableton too soon into the compositional process, hijacking the bit that the ot is best at (movement, variation, transition). Try forcing yourself to do more on the machine. Also: stop thinking of tracks as individual stems, rather just elements in a bigger piece of music. Give up on individual tracks and just do most of your mixing on the ot.