If I pass live audio trough the Octatrack but do not sample into it, what fx can it provide for me (excluding modulation such as reverb, delay, chorus etc).
What I’m interested most is, can I use stuter, pitch or similar gliches or retrigers on live performing artist in real time?
If so are there any examples you could link me pls?
Cheers!
OT has some cool modulation capabilities (3 LFO’s per track) which can effect a combination of 1-2 effects per track. Most people do not find the OT FX particularly appealing though. You can also sequence stuff which is pretty tight.
You could do a stutter with an LFO on the volume, and you can do an echo freeze delay on the track which is pretty cool. I’m not an FX connoisseur, but I find the effects to be useful enough on the OT and hold a great deal of potential in shaping the sound. You can affect the pitch, I think, only when you store the sound in the unit(via the looper or sampling), no live pitch shift through the THRU machine.
Though, you don’t need to be a sample-guru to get a lot of use out of the machine. If you get to the point where you’re processing your music you’re just down the road from live sampling, and then you get to invent and reinvent the instrument you’re playing.
Yes … but that effectively means sampling in, albeit in realtime without it interrupting your flow … ahead of time you’d set up the environment into which the incoming audio would be subject to buffer manipulation
this is really what the 
is about
I think, if you just want to process audio, you might be best off with a KP3 or KP Quad.
I love it to record audio i send through my elektron. This audio i slice and randomize in new tracks. Then i set the scenes on such a way, that i can hear the dir 127 input or the randomized loop. This helps me to create massive fills, or unexpexted changes in the beat. I usually use 3 different tracks with beat variations.
So it is sampling; i know it is not really what you are looking for, but it is more like advanced and prepared looping.
Problem i have with the fx on the input, is that i need the through machine, and i never get the sound right. So i only use my master on the dir 127 input, the master contains filter (i use for song transition) and dark reverb (to cheese up my best sometimes)
If you can be succesfull with the through machines (maybe some people are, there is a topic about it somewhere on the forum), you can create neighbour machines and create a big amount of modulations by using fx. Stutter with freeze delay, use filters; although the spiral fx should be cool like in Pioneer mixers, i never get good sounds out of it. But there is enough to experiment with and to connect with scenes to make things east
Also trig conditions on delays can help to stutter
Yes I understand the OT is ment for sampling and I belive it is very good and most importantly very inspiring but, nevertheless, I’m only interesting what can it do in real time without sampling at this point, because I can’t find much info.
Synced square LFO is good idea for sttuter emulation but it does not give me option to (let’s say) retrigger first 8th notes of some instrument.Is there a workaround?
Keeep in mind that band is playing in sync with MIDI clock (if that helps at all)
All in all I understand the beauty in sampling and samples and I doi it a lot, but this thread is ment to inform me (and perhaps others) of what can it do without it.
Thank you for fast responses! Keep them comin’
Will check KP3 and Quad
of course the OT can do a stutter effect. but how do you want to do that with any piece of gear without sampling into a buffer first? the question doesn’t make sense to me.
iZotope’s Stutter Edit can do it in real time
You can set up a flex machine to record and play at the same time. Once this is done you are effectively sampling in real time. You don’t have to think of it as sampling, your not manually pressing something and then waiting to play back your recorded sample. It is recording and playing back some milliseconds later, sort of like a realtime sample stream. The latency is not enough to notice. This is really what a thru machine or even direct monitoring is doing anyway because the analog inputs must be converted to digital to be processed in a buffer and then back to analog, so the OT is sort of always realtime sampling.
You can get a little bit of pitch shift in real time with a flex recording and playing for the same point. You can nudge the recording trig slightly back from the playback trig with micro timing, and be able to pitch shift more but with a hair more latency.
But again once you set up your flex machine in this way you don’t have to think of it as sampling, it just keeps going, and you keep playing through it, in real time…
Edit: I realize I’m not sure if you can get a bit of pitch shift if the recording and playback trigs are on the same step, I think you get a little, you just get more range as you nudge the recorder back, until you feel latency. I do have a part that is set up to live pitch shift the inputs a few semitones, but I think I set the recording trig a micro step or two back, I’ll have to look. Either way it works… and there’s a lot more you can do with a live flex track.
no it can’t. it has to sample into a buffer first before it can do anything.
the complete list of OT FX you find in the manual. there’s no dedicated “stutter” effect. but you can set up the OT by using record triggers which will automatically record incoming audio and spit it back out as you wish. it is a bit more manual set up work than a generic “stutter” effect, but it gives you more control over the effect too.
also you could map the scene fader to the delay parameters to quickly loop a short passage.
@Open_Mike
Thank you, that is what I was looking for!
@alfred
Perhaps I didn’t make my self very clear what I need Octatrack for (I don’t speak English often)
I don’t mind if it is sampling as long as I can tweak in real time.
I wanted to know what can i tweak/mangle without recording a bar or two before it is ready
Few miliseconds is more then fine by me
Is there any audio/video examples any of you can point me that does exactly that?
Thank you
You can easily set up the OT to loop and stutter your incoming audio without actually sampling. You can set the delay effect to be a live looping device with loop times in the milliseconds, thus giving you intense stutter effects. Pitched effects will not be achievable without sampling though.
you don’t have to record a full bar if you only want to stutter a short part. you can record only that part into the buffer and instantly start the stutter playback.
First i wanted to do everything live…
LAtsr i found out it makes more sense to prepare. It is live enough…
The OT is a musical time machine. It’s all sampling, as has been said. I keep meaning to try out the “live flex track” thing. This weekend for sure 
Nice.
It would be cool to hear what it can do in that mode.
Even on standard sine wave would suffice 
For playing live I use my ot for the pattern transition trick. You record the last bar into the ot and cross fade to the recording. Then you can change the pattern playing on your analog four and cross fade back. Gold!
Hi Springbox,
the OT - as a lot of people wrote - can do live manipulation very good… including stutter and live “buffer” effects… (like retrigger short sounds phrases live)… please see the OT as a 8-Track-Live-Looper with tons of efx on board…
but please keep in mind that timing/synchronized tempo is key for that. The OT is super tight in a midi-setup, but if you only record “akustik” instruments, you will have to “tap” tempo, which at the end mostly results in bad stutter timings.
TIP: If you are searching for a cool live engine now and maybe later will start to use the sampling functions of the OT… BUY IT… its gorgeous… but you need a while to understand its structure
If you are just looking for live mangling (without beat sync) also in the future… Buy a bunch of guitar pedals and a mixer with many FX inserts… The quality of the EFX is better (for the same overall price) and its the old dub way… anyway if you do not have a “midigear” controling the tempo, any kind of beatsync efx like stutter/retrigger etc will be a problem live, so focus on delay clouds, phasing, distortion, reverb and so on :-))