Yeah I always want to stick as long as possible to one Project, but that’s a good point, if you just always start in a new Bank you’ll always start fresh an immediate with a fresh Kit. The OT doesn’t have a limit on the amount of Projects anyways.
PS O wait and I always combine OT with another Elektron, so I have to make due with “just” 8 banks usually.
A pro golfer can go a round of golf with just a 7 iron and easily beat a novice with a full set of clubs.
Well then we can just close the forum 
(just kidding)
Thread popped up high in the “recent” posts list, so I read a few posts, thought I’d throw in my 2 cents: I have the OT for over 2 years now. It’s under-used actually. Maybe at 20% of it’s capacity. I watched many a video, read TONS of posts on this forum, learned a LOT trying to reproduce stuff I liked.
So am I uninsprired using the OT only at 20%? the answer is: NO. It’s an essential piece in my set-up. The few things I master have become signature items in my music production.
I have come to the point where I KNOW now what I need to learn and practice for the next few projects I have started. I can hear what I want, I just don’t master the technique. Is this frustrating, or am I uninsprired? Absolutely not, I have spent DECADES to learn how to play guitar and the bass, how to sing properly, how to mix in studio and as a FOH engineer (I’m officially a professional musician, but I do FOH too, and ran a recording studio in the 80’s and 90’s, I retired from the engineer’s career but never will as a musician).
The OT, like ALL musical instruments (that’s what it is) needs practice and practice (and then some more). Forget about instant gratification. Noone can get even close to @Dataline or @sezare56 without putting the effort in. That’s what sets the OT apart from the “competion”. It’s in the instrument category. Not in the workstation category. FWIW…Cheers
That was actually the deal breaker for me as I tend to stuff my machines with tones of patterns (my Digitakt has 2 projects full of 128 patterns), all of which have different samples assigned. Of course you can p-lock and all, but it’s not very practical.
… but 16 Scenes for each Part … and 128 crossfader points between any two Scenes.
16,384 samples per project if you use sample chains.
yeah, but like I said for me it’s not really about what is possible but about what is practical (because you know… a cheap laptop can do everything already 
)
If I have to jump hoops to do what I need most, it’s just not the right tool.
It’s not right for everyone but I absolutely LOVE parts.
Before I even touched an OT and knew how it had implemented its parts feature, I had set up both my Analog Four and Analog Rytm in very similar ways. 4 kits per bank. When I got the OT and saw how parts were implemented, it made 100% logical sense to me. It’s as if I had the same instincts as the OT’s designers, on how to make the most of a bank of patterns, with well defined sequenced sections of a tune. (Intro, main, break, outro)
It’s ideal if you want pattern variations of the same sounds in a tune, and if you want to switch between those patterns in realtime, in a performative way. This gives me 4 patterns that reference the same part per tune, and so 4 tunes per bank.
That’s 64 different tunes I can play in a single project, which is ideal for live performance.
I do wish OT had the direct jump capability the Analogs have, but there are other trade offs, like the ability to creatively shift a tune in its entirety by changing the part in realtime.
Plus it has twice as many pattern banks as the analogs, so the 4 parts per bank limitation doesn’t bother me at all.
Like any other feature, it can be polarizing. The features that you don’t embrace have the potential to annoy you. And I have plenty of real life things to be annoyed about, so I’m trying to choose not to allow synth and sampler features to annoy me. Working on embracing it all and seeing how it influences my creative output, instead.
And yea, it helps that I’ve been a proponent of chains since my AR days. This has also made DT a no-go for me, which I admit, is a bit contradictory to my “just embrace it” ethos. But I don’t need to collect every single Elektron, either.
What you said Mr Jay ^^👍
I think like some other aspects of the OT, parts get unfairly criticised, sure, coming from another machine that has a kit per pattern, or a totally freeform structure on first look parts may seem restrictive.
However I think that they do make sense, and simultaneously encourage and accommodate both organisation or total chaos with equal deftness.
Like most people, at first I was not sure about parts, they just seemed a bit restrictive, but when you consider the ease at which things like copying and sample locking, and scenes are implemented, after a while I learned to appreciate their convenience.
There are many scenarios where the OT beats most other machines, but it really does require that the user fully understands both the flexibility and the limitations, and the structure, in order to get the best from it.
That sounds somewhat like a vague statement, but the reality is you are probably using your OT in a totally different way from other users, and each project can be set up differently if you want, and that is the beauty of the OT structure. No it isn’t perfect, but perfection is different for different people, once you get past that and make it your own though it can get damn close, IMHO.
If my first proper foray into the OT is to use it as a live mixer for the AR and A4 (where I’d also look to be catching live loops from them), does this mean I won’t come into much contact with PARTS? It’s just for use with samples?
You can definitely only work out of a single part if the OT is only mixing external inputs, and live looping.
Well said. I’ve had the Octatrack since January with the added benefit of 2 years on the Digitakt, and a stage is the last place I want to take it at this point in the journey. Its frustrating at times, but the more time you spend with it the easier it gets.
I keep my set up simple but it still takes minutes for this reason. May take more as I get deeper of course. But you really have to create your workflow each time.
if you’re using it for a performance mixer etc… what are you using for editing and mangling samples, is there a reason in particular that the octatrack is not the best option in spite of it having slicing, editing, and mangling onboard and you’re already running audio through it?
I think before I get an octa I gotta figure this aspect out cause I’ve heard other people say the same thing.
Parts are essentially the state of the machines. All of your SRC (including which machines), AMP, LFO, FX1 and FX2 settings for all 8 tracks are saved into parts, but not right away by default. The best suggestion I’ve seen to use parts with is having a “home base.” Set up your tracks with whatever samples and machines you want to use. Once you’re all set, save to part one under the Part Edit screen. Now get a bunch of crazy sequences going, and then switch to part two. Suddenly you’ll have nothing, even though the sequences are still playing. That’s because under part two all of the track parameters have been reset. The sequence trigs are still active as they are stored in the “pattern” part of things. Now go back to part one and everything will be back to where you left it. At this point you can start tweaking the shit out of things, and if you find yourself too far down the rabbit hole hit Func and Reload Part and you’ll be back at “home base.”
I would imagine in using OT as a live mixer that Parts would be especially useful if you wanted multiple live mixer setups and machine states.
Perso : I’m trying to organise my parts as 4 different keyscale in the midi tracks… Can be interesting imo.
I would love OT has a tuner FX to tune samples
Finally got home & in front of a computer. So I don’t really do beat shit at all, or if I do the beat is very simple and comes from my DFAM. I don’t sample into it, really. If I use samples, they’re metal percussion or field recordings that I’ve edited in a DAW. I also have a fair amount of pedals and other effects that I ran samples through, usually resampling them either into the OT or to a DAW, but I don’t do that very often.
So, my setup currently is this: channels 1-4 are reserved for either for samples, longer field recordings or metal percussion so static engine and no mangling or for pickup machines, if I want to use live looping. Sometimes I do flex machines and neighbour machines for live sampling, but very rarely. I do use some FX and scenes. Channels 5-7 are thru channels, stereo channel and two mono channels. All 4 inputs in use. These are how I mostly make my music, I have a few synths and contact mics and I use no-inp mixing techniques a lot.
Sometimes, if I want melodic elements, arpeggios etc. I’ll use the OT to control my Dark Energy via midi. I also give my DFAM master clock from the OT by routing the metronome into a cue output and plugging into the clock input on the DFAM.
Everything goes thru the Analog Heat and into a DAW. I sometimes use all four outputs from the OT and only put two channels thru the Heat and two direct into my interface, but rarely.
I don’t think there’s any other piece of gear that would offer the same functionality as the OT for my setup. I could take away the DAW and just record four channels into a Zoom recorder and it would be more or less the same. I don’t really make music on it, I don’t slice samples or use the sequencer except as a midi controller. I don’t mangle samples, I rarely even edit them with the OT. Yet it’s essential for my workflow and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. And then when I do need it’s sampling capabilities, they’re always there.
I see, it almost seems like the octatrack is already the mixer that people want elektron to come out with or close to it