X is best for this
Y is best for that
Pfff
What a waste of time, Ooops I just wasted my time… .
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Its anything but a waste of time.
Knowing whats best at what is what its all about…
Could be.
There would be nothing much new happening - always using “things” in a way they are best for (objective?) are not meant for (again?).
Art just happened, maybe, maybe not. Tools meant for doing something or not, maybe different. Tomorrow. Maybe life is a dream, our dreams our life All good 
Life is short. You try to reach for the best tool for your vision. Happy accidents is another thing, and totally valid too…
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life is endless when I hear a great piece of music…
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I have to agree. Although i’m with my Octa for only 3 months, i’ve already lost hours learning how to use it, trying to prove the problem is me, not the machine. But so far i’m feeling like i’m wasting a precious time that should be used for musical-oriented stuff and not learning-machine stuff. I have also a Rytm and absolutely love it, so maybe the problem is not me.
Actually i already selling my Octa, but somehow while a buyer not shows up, i keep trying to use but so far, absolutely unsuccesful…
life is short when i hear a great piece of music - as in, wtf am i doing working all the time, i need to make more music!
Interesting insight and I partly agree, in as much as that performing a piece of music using the octatrack is not analogous to playing an instrument such as a guitar.
“MPC is where you create the music and OT is where you jam and manipulate the music”
This doesn’t make much sense to me though. If I write a song (or what I consider a song) from scratch on the ot, am I not creating music? I’ve done this a few times and, while I agree the recording of that song was definitely not “playing” but more “performing”, it is inarguably creating music
I think of the Octatrack as a sampler/sample mangler and would love to get one to accompany my Digitakt for all things slicing and chopping melodic and harmonic samples. An MPC can do that job too, but it sounds different (fx, mangling etc) and the workflow seems less “immediate” / “performance-y” to me (I own an MPC Studio and had an MPC Live).
If I were in the market for an all-in-one production tool, probably the MPC would be my go-to choice. But as I am looking to add to my hardware setup an instrument that can do cool things to longer, melodic/harmonic samples with a performance orientated interface, I very much feel the Octatrack is the way to go.
I see your point about the pads on an MPC (though playability depends on the model), but let’s be honest, that’s about the only performance relevant feature of the MPC. It’s workflow is clearly more Studio than gig.
As for “professional music”, if that means arranged, mixed, and polished to the highest commercial standard I think very few tools beat a computer with a full-fledged DAW for that sort of stuff (unless you have a couple hundred thousand bills and upward to spare for a hardware studio setup 
)
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i can completely understand this. subjectively speaking OT was big letdown, the MKI, both sonically and workflow wise. DT is heaven.
I really regret buying the OT tbh. I rarely use it. Only as a mixer / fx for DT+DN. But the fx …well… I don’t get warm with them on the OT. Also find it really tough to tame them / get something good out of them (whereas I have no problems at all with DT/DN).
I know I could still learn a lot but … well … I am back and forth thinking of selling it.
And now something is weird with the SD card or something - always getting errors that make the last used bank unavailable (“some errors occured ‘parse error’ do you want to abort loading the project?”) - really really annoying - only good that I am in fact not using it for my current productions as what it’s actually made for but only as mixer / master clock.
@dumbeat I think I get what you mean.
But with OT you can hit your (velocity-less) beat with slices for instance, then sculpt it further (e.g. filter, lfo modulation or any parameter for that matter).
Thing is, you need a loop to do so, but this p-lock based workflow actually works better for me than just hitting velocity sensitive pads.
Different workflows, but both let you play instinctively IMO.
Hmm, sounds to me like you need to dig deeper. Forget that amurrican brostep and get into some ”proper” UK dubstep.
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Isn’t burial said to be closer to the original uk dubstep?
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yes, although burial also leans a bit towards a more garage sound
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I’m trying to get into the OT for the second time and this thread is giving me inspiration to keep pushing my small brain. Many thanks to the op and all the replies x
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I’ve had a few friends and acquaintances who worked at Akai over the years (it’s a pretty big employer where I am), and the consensus was that they hadn’t made a good product since at least the MPC1000. I know one guy who writes off everything after the MPC3000becasue thy got so many complaints from professionals who moved from the 3000 to the 2000 and couldn’t deal with the looser internal timing - post MPC 3000 the sequencer timing isn’t sample accurate, so if you layer two identical sounds you get phase cancellation (that was a common technique on the 3000 for fattening up drum samples). I like the 2000 a lot regardless, and it’s internal timing is comparable to the Octatrack (which is already better than average for a hardware sequencer) so it’s good enough for me.
Personally I think older MPC style machines (the Ensoniq stuff would probably be just as good) and the Octatrack compliment each other really well, they both have very different strengths and fill in a lot of each other’s gaps.
I was getting that for a while, and also randomly changed parameters when reloading a saved project, after the OT got very cold (below -17C) in a car for a few hours when I was traveling during a bad cold snap back in December. Reformatted the CF card (a good quality aftermarket one recommended by a lot of users on here, don’t feel like pulling it out now to check the exact type, either a Kingston or a SanDisk of some kind), reformatting in the OT didn’t help and reformatting with the standard Window format command didn’t help but using a low-level CF format tool (either Neowin USB Disk Storage Format Tool 5.0 or Ridgecrop GUI Format, I forget which - tried both but one of them consistently hung at 99%) did the job and I haven’t had any trouble since. I backed up my card first and ended up only losing three or four files in a couple of projects that had been corrupted and were giving me the parse errors.
Thinking about it now, when I’m working with slices (rather than individual hits of some kind) in the MPC I’d say at least 2/4 of the time I turn velocity sensitivity off because I feel like it showcases the internal dynamcs of whatever I sampled better if all of the slices are played at the same level more often than not.
On the OT, I always find it a bit harder to get the timing really tight because of the long travel of the buttons compared to pads, there’s almost a sort of mechanical latency built in (and you don’t want to really bang hard on the trig buttons like on MPC pads because it’s not that comfortable and they weren’t really designed to withstand a lot of that over a lot of years). But it doesn’t double trigger like on the MPC2000/2000xl, I’m sure if I fingerdrummed on the OT as much as I have on the 2k I’d adjust to the feel of the trig buttons just like I learned to play on the MPC pads without double triggering.
Point being they’re both different, valid tools but to a large degree it’s down to practicing the physical aspects of playing. Look at those David Haynes HR-16 finger drumming videos that have been on Youtube for ages, for example. I had an HR-16 for years and believe me, those are just about the most unpleasant, unmusical pads you could possibly ask for (although still velocity sensitive - it’s just not very even) and he’s pulling a lot of expression out of them, whether you like the music or not.
Even working entirely ITB there’s a lot more physicality to making music than I think people tend to realize. The OT is certainly a very physical machine in my opinion, just in a different way from a pad-based workstation or drum machine like it usually gets compared to.
That turned into kind of a long ramble but I have to get to work so it’s going to have to stay as-is.
In regards to unquantized live performance:
The OT is a “step dependent machine”. It’s whole operation is focused around it’s step sequencer. Very different than MPC at the core.
Its more like a sampling TR/TB than a traditional sampler, be it an Akai, emu, ensoniq or anything else for that matter.
You have a small number of steps per cycle (64 max) to deal with.
Its the equivalent of cubism in painting. Fairly primitive in this aspect, But who to say you cant get creative with limitations?
Another big thing to be aware of is it’s not recording “length of note”, i.e “note off”.
There is no musical expression with disregard to note length. So another major problem in the live aspect.
I know you can tweak to some extent after the fact, but then its not a live performance anymore.
Its extremely low resolution compared to the human feel. We are far from being restricted to 64 steps per cycle in the way we feel things. It does have a 1/138 note micro quantizing but you can still only have up to 64 appearances in a cycle.
Its more of a robotic aesthetic if you will.
Thats why i belive its made for long samples of pre produced music, that contain the feel in it already, and does not need to be programmed from scratch on tne OT, Or a Techno type thing where 8th and 16th notes are the building blocks.
MPC is not limiting you to nothing audible as far as the smallest subdivision and number of appearances per cycle(vs. 64 in OT- the resolution is so high and your not limited to number of steps). And it records the lengths as well- very important.
It is dependant only on your playing skills on the pads. Different world really.
In my opinion, the parameter locks and scenes are the single biggest advantage of OT.
And for people coming from TR/TB world, this indeed feels like home.
Im not even gonna go into its being an 8 part monophonic sampler…(no polyphony already puts it in a category different to most samplers on the market)
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