I was prepared for pain when I bought it, but even so, I was on the fence for awhile before I decided to keep it. I developed a deep psychological rejection, where I fooled not only those around me but myself that I loved the machine and what it could be. But secretly I hated it for making me feel stupid and untalented, though I couldn’t even admit it to myself. Being raised on workstations, YamahaSY55, YamahaSY85, YamahaW5, Korg Triton, KorgM3, and so on, I was used to a different workflow. But I’d developed a taste for stuff that couldn’t be found in workstations, so I just had to take the leap.
I remember what the trigger was for me, where I started to realise that maybe I could make this work after all. Sampling through recorder trigs - I hooked up my Tempest to it and sampled sequences and stuff I’d done on that instrument, then started just messing with them. For some reason, it just worked and felt so easy, although the night before it had seemed impossible.
Now, we’re best friends and I consider it my backpack studio. I build my tracks wherever on whatever, then record them into the Octatrack and make something out of them that couldn’t be done on any other instrument.
Calling it a sampler is actually its biggest problem, I think, and it creates expectations that it takes awhile to calibrate. The Octatrack samples, it’s great at it, if you need a sampler it will do the job and then some, even if you use it for nothing else. But that doesn’t make it a sampler more than a DAW or a tape recorder, which also record audio.
So yes. For me , it’s my recording studio, which I can also bring to live gigs. Very convenient.