What about a "WTF thread"

Elektron Gear Octatrack
#1

OK, so now I spent one entire hour to figure out why my conditional triggers didn’t work at all. I had a Digitone before I got the OT, so I am familiar with the concept.

So I loaded a flex with a sample 16 beats long that I just sampled, I set a sample trig on the 1st beat of a 4 bar patttern, set up a neigbour track, made a cool sounding groove out of all then decided that it was a bit too fully loaded so I decided to set a condition in that 1st trig. NO way! Did’t work. Tried everything, started from scratch, tried other samples, classic OT-messing-up-with-your brain stuff. And then all of a sudden a light went on and Yep! of course it was soooo simple: the sample was simply looping over the exact lenght of the pattern. I could have set whatever condition I wanted, each time the pattern looped, the sample did too. Overriding the trig condition, of course. Solution: turn loop off, problem solved.

Now this is so typical of all the thingies I learnt spending a LOT of time both on the Digitone and the Octatrack, that I said to myself that I would have loved if there’s was a “WTF thread” somewhere, because I’m sure I’m not the first not the last user coming across such hair-pulling situations. (I spent HOURS on the DN trying to figure out how to un-mute a certain track, cycling through the many colours each track button can have: another WTF moment when I finally got it).

What do you guys think?

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#3

I have this same level of confusion when trying to figure out the Arp on the Digitone. I need to RTFM, but at the moment, my time is spent RTFM-ing the Octatrack manual, hehe. Thanks for sharing though, these little things can take up so much time, when it’s really a simple fix.

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#4

Then with Loop “on” trig conditions don’t work?

#5
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#6

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#7

They do actually work, but the time lapse where you don’t want to hear the sample and set up a condition to achieve that, is covered by the sample looping until it’s retriggered. In my case, the loop being the same lenght as the pattern, and the trigs placed on the 1st beat, (very common!) I experienced a WTF moment (1 hour lost) because I couldn’t hear the difference between the sample looping, and the sample being retriggered (kudos to the OT for such a tight sync, btw). In other words, when I set condition A:B to 1:2 I expected the sample to be played on the 1st, 3rd, 5th etc pattern loop. But because there wasn’t a trig on the 2nd loop, filtered out by the condition, the sample looped itself because “loop” was on, thus filling the gap. And there’s no audible difference. As a result, it sounded just like the conditional trigs didn’t work at all: perfectly continuous.

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#8

I guess for some people OT spells “WTF machine” :wink:

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#9

I was setting up a thru track the other day and couldn’t figure out why I had no sound coming out of it. They AB meters were lighting up, the direct gain of the mixer was off, the thru machine was setup to receive AB… I knew I had done it before, why couldn’t I do it this time?

Back to the manual and, of course, I forgot to put down a trig. God damn it.

This is compounded by the fact that, unless I’m mistaken, neighbor tracks don’t need a trig. It seems inconsistent to me… And I also just don’t know WHY. So if someone can explain the logic behind this to me that’d be helpful.

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#10

thru don’t need trig, press Track +play and you listen all the time until you don’t press stop.

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#11

Track+play IS actually a trig (ger), but it’s not sequenced. This is definitely a WTF moment :wink:

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#12

you’re right! :smile: although for me a trig is the one that is executed from the sequencer, but you are right.

#13

:rofl:

#14

WTF

(complete sentence)

#16

A few classics: playing around with rec buffers and forgetting to save/assign before switching off

Playing around with more than one part and forgetting to save them

Wondering why your sound is all messed up, eventually realising the fader has moved a millimetre away from scene A

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#17

Talking about Scenes, I have been forgetting a Scene had been set more than once.
So when I unmute a track, it would not play because muted by a scene…
While it happened more than once, I actually went to the point I would think one track was just not working anymore…

Another wtf moment is when a note from an external keyboard is triggering either a track, or starting/stopping the sequencer. I hate this.

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#19

WTF? :smile:

WTF moment :
Pattern change with new part > new part parameters don’t take effect if there is no trig on the track…

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#20

Yeah, sorry. Need more coffee today.

1 Like
#21

Here’s my personal WTF…all my chains are made in Octachainer. And I’m talking about drum kits with samples of different lengths.

When I load a chain in OT and slice, I get 16 “wrong” slices (of equal size), that failed to find 0 crossing of individual samples.
This happens in Static machine most of the time. Flex machine slices are usually correct.
User error?

…and some chains sound sped up, as if they were played back at triple speed and have smaller size. I found that it happens mostly if I use 16bit sample rate, so now I use only 24bit samples. (This last WTF is from Octachainer, not Octatrack)

#22

Static Machines are limited for that purpose. If it works with Flex, I don’t think it’s Octachainer’s fault.

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#23

That’s what I kind of figured out, plus Static machine can’t normalise…