Two Octas or One Octa one MDUW

I was wondering what do you guys think of having one octa and one MD for liv performance purposes, so far I own the two but my mind goes wild thinking about the many things one can do with 2 octas. Inhad the octas for about 3 days and im madly im love with it how ever the sound coming from the MD its so clean and powerfull, however I do use the MD mainly
for sampling afew of my own recorded percusion sounds, I guess Im looking for any opinions since recently some one offerd me to trade my MDUW for an Octa Im a bit confused and sincerely a bit confused any input ? or what would you guys do?

I like a bit of diversity…

Weren’t you leading a boycott or something?

depends on the amount of side chaining

I’ve thought about the trade of my octatrack for the MDUW… thing is the octatrack is just too good and the fader is simply brilliant for live manipulation of sound. It goes beyond any notion of being simply a ‘sampler’ playing back premade bitties… such a great machine. That said the synthesis on the MD is absolutely amazing once you dive into it. It can be so cold and punchy, depending on the genre you make I’d be on the side of having one of each machine.

I think the best of both worlds is Octatrack’s sampling and MD’s synthesis.

I had the thought to swap my MDUW for a second OT almost as soon as I got one, but from what I’ve gathered from a couple people here who have tried that, they don’t play that nicely together. I’m sure oldgearguy and Rusty will chime in with more.

I’ve never encountered any problems using 2 Octatracks together. I like to hear from oldgearguy & Rusty about the issues they’ve have had.

i really like to use the ot and md together. with the md i do more setup making patterns building kits and with the ot i do more on the fly.

i thought about getting a second ot, but i didn’t think i’d be able to really focus on the second one much live and i’d probably just use it for effects and bouncing and i’d have an easier time using other stuff for that.

Thanks for your Input! guys !!

Such as?

Obviously straight off the bat you would be losing polyphony, 8 tracks, variety, and user input… depends on your reliance on samples / or own source material.

Personally, I would suggest not getting a second Octatrack just yet… let the honeymoon period wear off, and get to know her a bit better, her strengths, issues and limitations, before going all in.

Seeing as I’ve been called out :zonked:

For context, last thing of many that I was trying was to have a master / slave relationship, ooh matron, where master midi tracks could mute / unmute slave audio tracks, linked cross faders etc… had a couple of minor quibbles…

  • Tempo sync issues between master and slave / slipping clock
  • Parts don’t send / receive midi
  • [Function] + [Mute] doesn’t send CC’s correctly
  • Transport / change issues
  • Project management is a pain between two Octatracks, never mind one, luckily I can get round that quite easily, but still, fucking joke imho.

My primary reason for 2 OTs was using one as a pickup machine and the other as a regular flex/static OT. (Actually my initial reason for two was to have 8 outputs like one would assume you’d have with an 8 track sampler, but that’s another rant…)

Unfortunately, if an OT pickup machine is slaved to an external clock, Timestretch doesn’t work and you also drop out of overdub.

So if you don’t use overdubbing in your Pickup machine setups then it won’t matter to you. If you had visions of 2 OTs doing a Frippertronics kind of thing, you’re probably out of luck.

The benefit of 2 OTs is more individual outputs for external processing. You can also cross-couple them by routing the Cue outputs of one to the AB inputs of the other and vice-versa. It’s kind of similar to using one Flex machine to record the output of another track/cue/main, but you have an entire 2nd machine’s worth of tracks and processing available (as well as 2 track 8/Master tracks for processing).

The stuff you can get out of an OT is mindblowing with just about any type of input material. A thorough review and update to the codebase would make the machine completely unreal.

Will follow the advise of keeping one MD and one OT I was just very tempted after watching the headlesshorse boiler room performance and the Terrence Fixmer one, it seems that in most cases they rely in 2 OT and basicly fade in and out one from another, once again thanks for letting me hear your advice , this Forum has o be the nicest I have ever been part of thanks for not making it painful guys!!

So, in my studio we had four OTs but I only used two at any point in time…now I’m back to using one OT with an AR and that has kept me happy since the newer drum computer’s sample layering and P-Locks tweaked over the Synth engines really provide a comprehensive solution to the personal angst I experienced with MD’s MIDI&file management, Tempest’s issues, sample drum sounds through soundcards+software+controllers, and running two OTs just to get the ‘selected sample sound’ function that made the 2nd OT literally redundant. You can experiment and function with two but consider that dedicated machines with purpose may work better and allow you to structure the track playback on an OT to serve its own purpose within your set-up.