The 'I still love my Octatrack' thread

It’s seriously the best combination I’ve ever worked with. So damn inspiring.

edit: I’m using mk1, of course :wink:

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and mkI still gets the Conditional Trigs, hurrah :slight_smile:

yes the Digitakt for single sample sequencing, the OT for loops, mixing and expressive re-arranging.

also going to use a Machinedrum mkII Userwave and the Korg Prophecy, with the Jomox mBase11 functioning as a monophonic analogue bass synth doubling basslines.

/OT

but the cool thing about the Digitakt’s friendly interface is, i’m hoping it will kind of encourage a more fun approach to the Octatrack, somehow.

two extremes - the friendliest sample sequencer in the world and the most complex, side by side.

i think 50 percent of the acclimatisation time required with the Octatrack is all about file management, and related subjects.

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I don’t know much about how converters can get damaged with signal levels, but my input LEDs are most often orange and red, and over 6.5 years later I notice no difference :wink:

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Oh man thats rough, I cant imagine how much that must have sucked. I avoid liquids in my studio at all times, man I make people wash their hands before they touch my gear though :sweat_smile: Nice that you can say it went to good use though. I wish you much fun with mark 2, plus the upgraded screen and buttons and shortcuts, I think youre probably gonna appreciate what they did decide to upgrade more than anybody

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It’s a beast , I love it, just so fast to work on, sometimes slightly frustrating but it’s usually user error.

Mine will die with me (hopefully before me lol) and while there are very few pieces of gear I say I’ll hold onto, this is definitely one of them.

Users unite :hand_splayed:

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Quoted for truth.

While super rich and deep and certainly possessing a decent learning curve for an electronic instrument, it didn’t take nearly as long as learning the stringed instruments I play. That took just a couple decades (give or take) :smile:

Exciting times for hardware sampling.

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It’s not that hard to understand, you can definitely grasp it and feel comfortable in some weeks/months…
But the thing is it keeps going…
I have a feeling even the most advanced OTists aren’t pushing the machine anywhere near its limits…
For years you can come up with new things to do with it, and if you really wanted to treat it as an instrument you could probably get really Jedi ninja crazy with it setting up complex things very quickly, and treating it more tactility where your constantly laying and removing trigs, playing the fader with one hand while adjusting knobs with the other only in their sweet spots, stuff like that…

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So if I were to use the OT like most people use digitakt the workflow is just as simple?

the confusing parts are when you dig deeper into the options?

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I cant wait for that kind of mastery, I can see how that kind of improvisation could take years to achieve. I think I could preplan doing some ninja moves but I wouldnt nearly be able to keep up that kind if improv for a whole set yet without getting repetitive yet

@eli5 yeah man, it can be as simple as an 8 track step sequencer and nothing more going all the way up to complex madness like 8 independant lengthed tracks of audio and 8 of arpegiatted midi with 3 LFOs (you can even design your own LFO shapes) per track routed to individual parameters with 2 FX per audio track, with each audio channel sliced into 64 pieces modulating which slice plays per trig with FX changes per step. You can change the amp envelope per step, the retrigs, near enough every parameter. And then theres scenes with your crossfader on top of that. Theres a world more stuff, your options get wild very quickly

Ps doing absolutely everything at once will usually just sound like mad glitch music, it is nowhere near necessary to try to use everything at once, but the freedom to will make you work in different ways, the OT is kind of modular in how you use it, im sure anyone can find good use for an octatrack

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I thought the main diff in the sound quality of the OT and DT is the way sample interpolation is handled? You need to A/B mangled samples to each other, like pitching down/up an octave etc… Just a static playback of samples should not yield big diffs unless one of the devices was broken.

Also, the DT might be more forgiving wrt bad gainstaging…

i’m guessing the sweet spot for the Digitakt is going to be when repitching between five less or more tonal steps.

that is where the non-linear interpolation is really going to shine.

merely guessing. but the brand new programming style will show its true colours around that zone, in the maintenance of a more natural formant quality of the tone, perhaps, depending on the sample - the benefits would be possibly more evident with chord and bass samples.

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yeah, good idea - How about an A/B of OT vs DT with a four voice chord sample, made up of repitching a single individual voice sample across four instances to produce said chord?

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Nothing wrong with mad glitch music :wink:

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This would be cool, as it seems that a lot of the DT’s purported sound differences have to do with its repitch engine.

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and to do with the way the sound engine’s interpolation is somehow enhanced by that magical reverb.

i never liked any reverb until i heard a lovely Lexicon reverb, then was again quickly bored by reverb.

but now that i hear the Digitakt reverb, my senses are alight with possibilities.

Not knocking the glitchers out there! I know this from experience, I end up going nuts and making glitch more often than i’d like to admit, started with the intention of making hip hop but ive plugged the vinyl into OT like once? I can get so much out of a tiny sample that I barely even end up making vinyl chops. The octa sounds glitchy by nature when you push it

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I think I may have talked quite a well respected international artist out of selling their OT recently because I stated how much I still (and will always) love my OT and why…

Best box ever. It’s not a learning curve, it’s a ramp to get you airborne like a V2!

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Only had the OTMK2 for less than two weeks, so I’m in learning curve hell, but I totally get why people love em so much and it’s standing the test of time quite well. I’ve had a DT for awhile and I love it to pieces. I don’t think it’s wise to think about what it ‘can’t do.’ It’s super fun and I get a lot done on it. The OT/DT combo sounds really great to me. Tons of possibilities

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You make it sound like making glitch is something to be ashamed of. Therefore, be ashamed of yourself! :wink: Glitch every day all day. And the octa does it damn well. :smile:

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