You gonna make me wanting octatrack…
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Missed a week as I was traveling. Coming back with two this week. #6:
Added an Analog Heat and an Oktakontrol to the mix this time.
As usual, single note loops on every channel, all vocal samples. This time I’m playing them with the mixer like a keyboard, bringing notes in and out of focus. Kind of like the tape loop keyboard approach in 10cc’s “I’m Not In Love”. Crossfader controls pitch on multiple channels, switching between a few different extended chords.
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Really enjoy these tracks.
Without giving to many secrets away how about a video on how you go about creating these tracks please ?
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Inspiring audio magic!
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Thanks!
Firm believer in being transparent about technique, no secrets here. I’m not sure I want to get tutorial-y on my channel, but I’m happy to answer any questions about process.
Most of these have a roughly similar approach. I’ll walk through it for this one: I started by selecting a sound source. In this case, it was individual vocal notes from a two octave chromatic scale from a commercially available sound library. I assigned these ascending by channel. Exact “tuning” not important, but I think it was something like “A, C, D, E, G, B, D, F”…something to get them spread over most of a couple octaves. It helps when they’re on different notes, as you can get away with smaller pitch shifts per channel when changing chords (described later).
Next I turn off timestretching, then turn on PIPO looping for each channel (so that when they reach the end of the sample, it plays in reverse from the end). I trim each sample on the OT so that there’s no silence as they’re looping.
Then I add some subtle LFO modulation on every channel. For the speed on these, I use different low prime numbers per channel to make sure nothing’s interacting rhythmically. LFO1 modulates pan, increasing in speed and depth as we move from track 1 to 8. LFO2 modulates filter base (basically HPF cutoff frequency, as the “width” is wide open), again increasing we go up by track. This modulation is barely noticeable, more like a way to give subtle volume modulation. I set FX2 to “Lofi” on each track, and set the AMF and AMD to different values per channel for pretty subtle amplitude modulation. Then LFO3 modulates AMF to give that amplitude modulation some movement.
Compositionally, the next step is the most important. I set up 4 different scenes for different chords. To create these chords, I trigger all of the channels and listen to them playing together. And then I hold down a scene button and change the pitch on each channel until I arrive at something new that sounds related and cool. I’m doing this intuitively and not really thinking about the music theory behind my choices. I’m looking for big extended chords with a lot of notes, as I want things that will sound cool as I fade notes in and out, later.
The rest of the signal chain is that the main outs are sent to the Analog Heat to thicken up the sound (moderate drive on one of the first few modes) and take off the high end (I start with a low pass filter with the cutoff halfway down). Then it goes to the Kilpatrick Redox, a reverb set to a long decay, about halfway wet. There’s also pan modulation going on in the mod section of the reverb itself.
Then the performance is pretty intuitive. I make these tracks in a spare hour or two and I’m trying to keep the whole thing spontaneous. I trigger all the notes at the start, then gradually bring in different notes with their (Oktakontrol) faders, feeling out the chord for a while. When the chord gets boring, I use the crossfader to move to a new one, trying to avoid too much of a queasy pitch bend. I keep playing around in that fashion. I think of it in terms of energy peaks and valleys. For more intensity, I bring in more notes, increase the drive setting, bring up the filter cutoff, increase the size of the reverb, etc. On this pass I accidentally switched the AH filter setting to bandpass, so in the last third of the video I’m exploring that for a while. But basically I just feel it out from there. For all of this, I like the fact that each channel of the Octatrack is a similar unit, a single voice in the choir. When each channel has its own separate approach, there’s more to keep track of.
Finally, I do EQ / master (and sometimes add even more reverb) to the final stereo file that I’ve recorded.
Let me know if that helps!
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Yeah that helps a lot. Thank you for such a detailed explanation of the process.
Looking forward to hearing some more of them in coming weeks.
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Thanks for sharing ! It’s so cool to see all the many (infinite?) uses of the Octatrack!
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#7:
Same gear as last week’s. This time I actually used the sequencer, and went for more of a rhythmic arpeggiated approach. But the idea of scenes/crossfader controlling chords is the same.
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Wait … what? The thing has even a sequencer built in?? 
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Really lovely music, thank you for sharing
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Catching up to my weekly goal with another one today. #8:
This is an (overtly) Arvo Pärt-inspired minimal tune. Single pattern with the usual crossfader controlling pitch. Sound sources are all SK-1 samples.
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playlist for the whole series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-u68NDGfrt-sCcTTdajLwhGNvMmq3E75
#9:
This week I started with the goal of only using sine waves as sound sources, one each on tracks 1-6. As usual, the crossfader+scenes control pitch of all tracks. LFO1 modulates rate with a square wave (producing the octave leaps you hear in each voice), LFO2 modulates LFO1’s speed, and LFO3 modulates pan.
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I wonder if you can get rid of the annoying clicks. Need to try sines myself …
Could filter off some high end and get rid of them pretty easily, I think. I actually like the texture they provide here; I’m accentuating them with EQ.
And to be clear, the clicks are not from looping the sines, but from a square wave modulating the rate parameter.
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#10:
lots of bass clarinet arpeggi
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Listened to them all
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#11:
same strategy, mix of brass and woodwinds this time. 1-4 = brass, 5-8 = winds. 1+5, 2+6, 3+7, 4+8 play the same notes an octave apart.
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#12:
This is the final track in this series. This time it’s all French horn samples, but the approach is similar to the previous two weeks.
Now I’m going to edit down and embellish my favorite bits from all of these tracks and put them out as an EP.