Just a relatively short message to the forum to say thank you for providing an exceptional resource and for giving it so much of your time, energy and expertise. I’ve been considering buying an Octatrack for a long time, but it’s expensive, and arcane, and peculiar, and while I mulled over that decision, I looked to this forum to make the most informed choice. Then about a week ago, I decided to buy an Octatrack, and I looked to this forum to decide whether I should buy a second-hand MKI or a MKII. Then the MKII arrived from Germany with it’s elliptical getting started manual and I wasn’t even really sure which way the flash card should be inserted, or when, before first run, after first run, after some initial install procedure, and so on, and I turned to the forum again to answer that question. Now, I’ve been hammering away at it obsessively for the last week and I have three resources for making this oddball device less of an enigma, less perversely organised, and more like the instrument it actually is, and needless to say this forum is on a par with the manual and Max Marco’s vid tutorials which are pretty damned awesome even if there isn’t enough of them. If it’s not in the manual, it’s in the Elektronauts forum. If it is in the manual, it is in the Elektronauts forum and it’s clear and actionable. Moreover, the forum answers all those asides and anxieties. Like, what can it really do that Ableton can’t or an MPC can’t? Man, that question was answered definitively!
To reiterate, thank you! This is a really, really awesome resource reminiscent of when the internet was like the Library of Alexandria rather than a platform for social media influencers and marketers and conspiracy theory quack jobs. I didn’t expect to enjoy learning the Octatrack. I was certain it was going to be like pulling teeth. But it has been quite the opposite. Thanks to this forum, the menu diving doesn’t seem at all bad, the directory structure makes a kind of crooked sense, the key combinations are already starting to feel like second nature, and I’m actually getting results from the damned thing when I thought I’d wind up spending months producing the kind of toy sounds that usually come out of tutorials. And better still, this forum has completely sidestepped the gear-head cultism that comes with music tech communities and helped me to see that the constraints Octatrack imposes actually illuminate the underlying technical problems of music in a quite surprising way. At this point, I better understand Ableton for example, because the Octatrack only gives you 3 LFOs and 8 tracks and now I know just how much you can actually do with even fairly elementary tools.
Anyway, I guess I’m waxing lyrical when all I really wanted to do was express a little gratitude for a community that keeps on giving and invariably goes above and beyond the call of duty. Keep up the good work everyone!
Just saying…
