I am a long-tooth. I’ve been bangin’ my head against music gear for nearly four decades. I am a pretty accomplished tech by trade, and a passionate musician by heart. I also possess a solid education from a formidable music school.
For what it’s worth…
The Octatrack (mkii in my case) has been the most productive AND the most enjoyable digital format musical device I have ever worked with.
It brings me joy. It keeps me productive. It works pretty much every single time. It doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is… and that means it does not impede my creative flow (usually… lol).
What a beautiful, matte grey with black knobs and buttons, piece of hardware it is.
Ableton Live would come in 2nd.
That said, please… please… please… don’t stop supporting this puppy. And I am sure I am among countless others that would be first in line when evolution reveals music’s next digital warrior.
The Octatrack really is something very special! It was my first Elektron device and just keeps surprising me with new cool workflows and endless otherwise uncharted territories.
Now after learning their other gear it is so fun and also pretty immediate to play with.
Glad to hear about your pleasant experiences with it!!
I know for a fact that development will continue, although it has also been made clear that major new features are not likely - which in a mature product is understandable and sensible.
There are quite a lot of things I’d like to see sorted, and I think quite a few of them have been hinted at being possible, but not promised.
I don’t want an Octatrack mk3 or Octatrack DPS2, although it would be hard to resist either
I hope to reach where you are…I still have not figured out where it is positioned in my “workflow” and as a result have not taken advantage of its potential…sometimes I wonder if I should sell it. However, I have hopes () not realized yet).
Thanks to this place and great OT supporters on Youtube, I don’t think this machine will stop.
Also, EZBOT’s video about using it as performance mixer makes me realized how good the OT sounds
The biggest leaps for me came from not trying to make too many tracks: bd, sn, hh, bass, melody etc at the same time but instead focus on 2 or 3 tracks with lots of neighbour tracks behind them and with pushing the use of fx to obnoxious realms.
well… my workflow lately is pretty simple. I am in the unusual position where I may have a little time to walk anyone interested through it. it’s not what’s universally right… it’s what’s right for me. I have been capturing and playing around with inspired tidbits pretty much my whole life. I don’t get paid to finish the job… so I don’t lol. how to spin it all together into a polished final product is not my objective or my cup o’ tea.
nonetheless, if anyone is interested, reply in the affirmative and I will look into it.
is anyone using this outside of a performance context? i find it appealing for a few reasons, but like many, doubt i’ll really use it in a way that sees it used to its full potential.
There’s only one person anyway using it to its full potential.
When you have a bycicle, you can just ride it without wondering « why don’t i do acrobatics with it? I’m not using it to its full potential… »
The OT has potential, like our brain, we don’t / can’t use its full potential but we can enjoy that it has more features than some machines where we hit the ceiling with pretty fast.
This was a real moment, I have always run samples from the OT but after seeing how EZBOT does it, it totally made life 10x easier and more fun to just use the OT as a mixer/sound effect unit versus all the programming and sequencing. I’ve hooked up my individual ableton channels into the OT and its so much fun to jam with.
Configure Ableton to send individual channels (in my case I send 4 mono channels) out to an external audio interface. I connect four outputs on my audio interface into the four inputs on the octatrack. I then run MIDI via my A4 (over usb) and then into my Octatrack.
Now you when you hit play on ableton you should see the tempo on the OT sync and the OT should start playing. It took a bit of fiddling for this to work and another config I had was to use the MIDI THRU on the A4 into the OT and send the clock and transport from the A4. But I couldnt get the OT to pickup anything from that.
