Double or quadruple the tempo to fit more steps into a pattern. Be creative or complain. I prefer being creative.
I can make music on almost anything though, and I enjoy making music with different things.
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You still get 64 notes per cycle no matter what you do.
I was merely outlining the way it operates and its limitations.
Save the preaching for your children. Im not one of them.
I apologize. This conversation isnāt for me, and I foolishly reacted unnecessarily. Iāll avoid this thread again so you guys can carry on with your conversation.
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Yeah you only get 64 steps but with resampling and dividing tempo you can basically accomplish anything . Resampling, thatās the key. If you donāt resample itās probably not for youā¦
Plus you can chain patterns and do even more pattern magic with the Arranger.
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You can many things, but on the MPC all you have to do is press Rec+Play.
Now count how many things you have to do in the OT to get to the same result,
Different horses for different coursesā¦ The OT is not made for Live programming,. Its great for mailing and post processing. Use the right tool for the job and get a lot done in less timeā¦
You have to press as many patterns as you want in a chain and press record. For some this is not a live programming killer.
That isnāt the killer perhaps, but no immediate quantize types, no note length recording, and pads that are self evident for not being performance pads but rather data entry pads, tell the purpose and story of this machine that is indeed amazing in other tasks indeed
its a sampling TR/TB in essence
I donāt know how the presense of pads screams live programming machine, but Iām sure there are a lot of things the MPC doesnāt do which one would consider essential for live programing.
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All you have to do is program two or three or whatever mono synth tracks then resample. Not so hard and deff not impossible like you suggest. You probably shouldnt try and persuade people to not use the OT when your view is limited due to your creativity
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If you look to close at one area of a picture it just looks like pixels, if you step back and look from a broader perspective the image can be seenā¦
By searching the forum one can read countless examples of the OT being misunderstood, underestimated, or approached from the wrong angle, often by folks whoāve had one for years. I wouldnāt try to sum up the OT without several years of experimenting/practicing/researching the machineā¦ Looking at the OT from narrow angles doesnāt do it justice, after putting in time and effort a more holistic view can be seen that puts all of the pieces together and reveals what the OT can truly doā¦
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@Open_Mike Right?.. Like Iām under the impression OT can literally do anything. Itās a sampler, like it can sound like and be anything you want it to be. Iām willing to bet, because Iāve noticed this with other members, OP probably doesnāt resample and probably uses the stock samples or other sample packs. Like thatās the problem not the OT lol
Donāt own an OT but did have an MPC500 and itās not a simple REC+Play box. It takes time like anything else. solid machine but sold it cause I never gelled with it.
I feel it comes down to how much time your willing to learn something, sacrifice productivity for knowledge.
you can play your trigs live and record it into audio as you playā¦ no limitations except how you play.
Perhaps one needs to use looping and recorders more for more unquantized, musical expression with the OT? when you lean more into recording audio rather than MIDI, alot of options open upā¦ Have you checked youtube how instrumentalists use the OT in their performances?
What do ya got for me?
Octatrack is somewhere between a much more advanced take on the Boss SP series phrase samplers and a hardware implementation of a classic tracker sequencer (with just a bit of looping thrown in), and it is amazing at that. Thatās what I got mine expecting and other than a few relatively minor things it has exceeded my expectations again and again. But if Iād gotten it expecting a full-blown sequencer or sampler Iād have been extremely disappointed, because it isnāt either one. A doesnāt pretend to be, but the fact that full featured sequencers and samplers have been about the most underrepresented varieties of hardware in the last 15 years and have only very recently started to see any kind of comeback (look at the prices of last-generation Akai and Roland samplers these days, still very cheap for what they can do but 2-3 times what they sold for when the OT was released, and climbing - and good luck finding a maxed out Kurzweil K-2xx with the sampling option installed for under $500 now), so I think there are a lot - probably a majority - of people getting in to hardware in the last 5-10 years who donāt really have a good sense of where the OT fits among samplers and sequencers, simply because there really hasnāt been much in the way of hardware sequencing since the early 2000s and full-featured hardware samplers pretty much only exist inside of workstation keyboards today.
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I use the OT almost exclusively for live programming and sampling. A big part of why I got it was because the MPC I was using was completely unable to live sample, and the only realistic option at the time was an MPC-1000 with JJOS, and Iāve had enough friends using that to know it wasnāt what I was after; now thereās the Deluge and the current generation of MPCs but I still think the OT is a better tool for what I want to do, with the old MPC to fill in the sequencing and drum-sampling holes and an Akai S5000 to fill in the sampling holes.
But I can and regularly do use jsut the OT with one or two external sound sources and nothing else to improvise a track from scratch, starting from a template project that has some basic routing and machine assignment choices made, but doing all of the sequencing, sampling and sample manipulation live in real time. I actually think the OT is really good for that, with the one exception (and this is easily my biggest gripe with the OT in general) no way to copy a pattern into a location other than the current one so you canāt seamlessly build up variations of a pattern in real time very well, which is a big oversight but can absolutely be worked around. I definitely also find myself getting in to the trap of building up a looping pattern to the point where itās very dense and not being able to gracefully pull it back to something simpler, because there arenāt enough tracks to build things up in many layers that can be muted and unmuted (in an MPC Iād devote 4-8 tracks just to snare or hi hat alone, for example, with a basic pattern spread across one or two tracks and increasingly complex embellishments spread across the rest to allow for a lot of improvised variation using track mutes), and you canāt easily make a simple pattern, paste it into a new pattern, add more, paste to a new pattern, and so on until you have a collection of variations that you can jump between on the fly. But there are other approaches using live resampling, playsfree tracks, arpeggiators, MIDI trigs with infinite duration, long delays with feedback at 127 used as loopers, and of couse all of the tricks possible with scenes or trig conditions, plus plenty more that I havenāt gotten to yet myself. It definitely takes a different approach than traditional MIDI sequencing or traditional X0X sequencing, though, and itās easy to get to a point improvising where stuff is just too dense and you have no graceful way out.
Anyway, like you say different tools for different jobs but I would say I think you might eventually find that the OT is better for realtime composition than youāre realizing.
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Well, I wouldnāt go that far. Try going to the MIDI sequencer and playing a C on the 1 of a bar and then playing a G on the 3 while sustaining the C.
The OT has plenty of limitations but so does every other instrument (or technology in general) out there, and thatās fine. For me personally, I got an OT because of the limitations of using an MPC2000xl and I keep the MPC because of the limitations of using an OT, and Iām very happy with both and count them among the very few instruments Iāve ever own that I couldnāt see myself ever willingly parting with.
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umm no, Iād play that with an ext keyb, not internal OT trigs
Talking about live looping, not using the MIDI seq