Timing placement on trigs

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

Whatsup guys, I need advice on something that has been bothering me for a while now. I’ve been working on the octatrack lately, and when recording unquantised, the placement of notes on trigs is weird, and different from the other elektron machines I’ve used (DT and AR). I hope I can explain this clearly:

On the AR/DT when you’re just ahead of lets say trig 5 timing wise when playing, it will place the note on trig 5, with some microtiming to the left. This makes sense, because the timing was closest to this trig.

On the OT, the same note will always be placed on the trig before, so on trig 4 in this case, with the microtiming set almost completely to the right. It looks like the OT will only place a note on a trig if it’s late, not if its just a little early. To me, this is very annoying, and I always have to manually change the trigs afterwards.

So my question: is this supposed to happen, and if so, is there any way to change this behavior? Thanks in advance!

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#2

Normal behaviour.
Dont forget the Octatrack predates the digi boxes by several years. Different designers.

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#3

Thanks! No way to change this behavior?

#4

I didn’t know you had one. Will you use it for hip hop battles ? :content:

Support@elektron.se

I use quantised recording all the time.

It would be interesting to analyse what are limits, using midi loopback for tests : send a C6 midi note, record it with an audio track.

Edit : done at 120 bpm.
Even with a midi trig set to -1/384, the audio trig is recorded on previous step (MT=7/128 instead of 23/384).
All negative values are recorded on previous step.

Had a funny result : with midi trig on 1st step set to MT 1/32 I had 2 trigs after 2 passes :
Step 1 : MT 1/32
Sted 2 : MT -1/32

With positive MT values, after 2 passes, you get 2 trigs even with 1/384…or 23/384.

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Digitakt vs. Octatrack
Playing In Time
OT sequencing DN, different result?
#5

I had expected behavior with Syntakt and midi loopback : below -1/32 microtiming, the trig is recorded on previous trig, not above -1/32 (included).

Above +1/32 (included), the trig is recorded on next trig.

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#6

Wow you went in, thanks for experimenting! This is kinda what I expected. The AR and DT seem to work like the ST in this regard, and this way makes a lot more sense to me than the way OT handles this.

Quantized recording seems completely counterintuitive to me, but with the amount of fixing I now have to do I might just switch to that setting. There’s no easy way on the OT to switch between the 2 either right? Like the way you can toggle between quantized and unquantized on the newer machines?

I did use my OT on the upcoming battle by the way! I like it a lot, but in some areas I much prefer my trusted AR…

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#7

Personalize menu is the only way but it is easy, Digis way is faster for sure.

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#8

Thanks.

I’m currently switching back and forth between the OT and AR as my main machine. I love the stereo sampling, slicing and quantized recording on the OT.

On the AR I love the sound of samples through everything, the ease of use and the way it works as an 8 channel monosynth. Things just sound better on the AR, although it can be too heavy/full sounding.

Even though the OT is great, it has some weird things which I dislike, like this issue described above, but also the inability to record velocity or note length.

You’re a very proficiant OT user, how do you deal with these things?

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#9

I found workarounds with midi processors (Velocity mapped to Amp Vol CC, Notes off mapped to Hold CC=0 to end note) but I got used to it.

And quantized rec.

I got an Hydrasynth recently, I can map velocity to amp vol CC, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to map note off to Hold CC=0.

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