The best Octatrack album bar none

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

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#2

Are there any other albums known to have been composed entirely on an octatrack?

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#3

Here is another great one: Flocking 19 | Shedding

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#4

@Sugamo What do you think is good about that album?

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#5

I did one, using only single samples, I think others have too.

Yeah “my favourite” would be a better way of saying it.

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#6

I am interested in hearing from folks who have used the OT for all or most of the recording, mixing and (possibly) mastering. In theory I guess you can do everything inside the OT including a final ‘mastered’ stereo mix and export that as a wav file. How far have people gone with this and what tips and tricks can you share?

#7

Something early from The Field should feature in this thread.

EDIT: not done entirely on the OT, though, I don’t think.

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#8

I will finish one soon :slightly_smiling_face: certainly not the best, but OT only at least :upside_down_face:

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#9

Are you planning to record the final mixes internally with the OT- or record the final mix to an external recorder or DAW?

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#10

I already recorded each internally by resampling to one track.

I will probably let them master on landr… can’t really do this myself. Not because of the OT but generally

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#11

Yeah I did that with a short album I did a couple of years ago. Everything was mixed on the OT. And then the final ‘master recording’ Not much to it really, eq and compressor on the master track. Dunno what else to say, mix the track
tweek it till it sounds good.

It can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.

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#12

I say this with good humour, but I do get curious when people say this. I very much doubt it’s a matter of just randomly twisting knobs till you happen to stumble on the sound you are after. If that was the case, we wouldn’t have some people who consistently manage to make great sounding tracks and the rest of us who consistently end up with a muddy mess.

There must be some level of prior knowledge or understanding that make it seem ‘simple’. I want to know details! What parameters do you tweak? What exactly are you listening for to ‘sound good’? With the OT compressor and EQ for ‘mastering’, are there ‘launching off’ settings you tend to go to and then tweak? Are there limits to what the OT can achieve that one should be aware of? Details like that would be really interesting.

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#13

Of course.
Eq is a simple affair, sculpt the sound as needed.

Compressor. I know how a compressor works, I know what i want to achieve. So in that particular example, a slightly squashed mix that pumps a little bit. So listening for the threshold, setting the attack and release to get the right movement, then dialing in the dry wet. (I like parallel compression, rather than a fully wet compressed mixed.)

So yeah- knowldege of what you are doing and why is essential. Once you’ve got that, it really is twiddle the knobs until it sounds good. But you know which knobs to turn and why.

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#14

I always start from an “init patch”
Limits? I dunno, I dont think so. But I dont know everything. @AdamJay churns out great mixes using OT. Maybe he’ll chime in with something more insightful.

#15

Great monitors and room treatments make all the difference.

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#16

Yeah, I was going to say, some of us end up with consistently muddy mixes becasue we’re too cheap and lazy to treat our rooms. Definitely not talking about myself there, definitely not.

Sure, $150-$250 would get me enough wood, cloth and Owens-Corning 703 to make half a dozen decent quality, 2’x4’ acoustic panels, but think how many pizzas that would buy! At least as many.

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#18

Super convinced this helps a lot.
But I‘ve heard a lot of mixes done in bad rooms or on headphones that weren’t muddy.
It’s not like you should stop put effort in your mixing just because your room is not treated

#19

“Tweak it” doesn’t mean “turn knobs randomly”.
What you do is tweak it until everything blends together

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#20

I was being a bit hyperbolic. I guess what I mean is it doesn’t really help you learn anything to be told ‘tweak it until it sounds blended’ if you don’t know which things to tweak and why you are tweaking them, or what to listen for that will tell you when the sound is ‘blended’.

#21

listen for mud in the mix. maybe there’s too much bass frequency across too many tracks.

filter out the lows on tracks like hi-hats where they don’t add anything but mud.

experiment with track volumes. maybe a track is louder than it needs to be in the mix (or too low)

…any basic mixing tutorial on youtube will have plenty more advice than me…

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