8 tracks wasn’t enough and it was easier to sample and edit samples with maschine.
To contradict my own reply earlier in this thread, I’ve been away from the Octatrack for a few weeks, since I finished my last track, and just noodling on my Reface CS and experimenting with a few ideas.
After a few recordings, I went back to the Octatrack just the other day to build something with my new clips. I found that after coming back from a simple instrument, the Octatrack doesn’t always make a lot of sense.
It’s like when you’re in with it, there’s a low level of resistance and you go with some kind of flow and get things done with it. But let it be for awhile, do other things and come back to it, and you have to ask yourself again, why am I bothering?
I had the opposite experience with the Tempest. I was away from it, tedious from the way we didn’t gel, and then came back to it after a month, realising how awesome it is.
It’s kind of the opposite with Octatrack. Return to it and you need to work yourself over that threshold again, to start to like it again.
It’s like watching Mad Men. You know this is good shit. You can tell. And yet, you’re wondering, am I the only stupid one because I don’t quite get it? Then, you start to like it, you start to get it, and by the end of a season, you love it.
Or is it that you talk yourself into loving it, because you just want to be one of the cool kids? 
Very similar experience here, I bought them both with in a few weeks.
I’ll use a different analogy.
The OT, like a slow moving truck is full of great stuff but it more often than not gets in the way.
The T just allows you to drive hard and fast even with its stupidly annoying quirks. (like MS Dos level data storage)
Maybe just me but I wonder if the huge number of options in both the hardware and software space is spoiling things for many of us. What I’m getting at is that each of us probably has an idea of what their ultiamte machine would be and consist of. Say tempest lay out with better O/S and sampling capabilities. OT with OP-1 display and more inputs, etc, etc. And because every piece of software/hardware out there ultimately fails at something in your own minds eye you start to get a little disgruntled with it and chip away at the things that it does well until you’re left with a large paper weight or something rotting away in the depths of your hard drive.
Software is so cheap and, relatively speaking, the price of pro hardware is far more affordable than old that I’m wondering that a few of us just fall into that trap of nit picking and dreaming of “if only it had this or that” rather than just rolling with it.
Anyway, I completely go off on a tangent there. The Tempest is another piece I miss a little. If only (ha, there I go again!) the O/S had been fully formed and fine tuned. Still, for just laying down a beat, it was a lot of fun. In the years to come, I think folks will look back on the Tempest and view it as a flawed classic. Almost like looking back and thinking about Eric Cantona - a genius with a football but a total bellend at times!
When I returned to the OT when I had it, I didnt find it too hard to get back up to speed with it but I did find myself getting a little exasperrated with why things where they way the where - especially if I had been using Live more heavily. I’m sure I’ll pick one up again some day though!
You have a point but it still just baffles me that they omitted or went crooked with so much of the work flow in the OT os with aspects that are just bread and butter in so much other cheaper/simpler hardwsre/software. If I look at it as a ‘complete song’ making machine I want to smash it against a wall pretty quick, it’s just too limited/tedious and hard to organise things compared to arranging/mixing in a daw. but if I just use it as a sampler it’s the best thing out there and I love it… Still missing polyphony pretty bad tho…
You have a point but it still just baffles me that they omitted or went crooked with so much of the work flow in the OT os with aspects that are just bread and butter in so much other cheaper/simpler hardwsre/software. If I look at it as a ‘complete song’ making machine I want to smash it against a wall pretty quick, it’s just too limited/tedious and hard to organise things compared to arranging/mixing in a daw. but if I just use it as a sampler it’s the best thing out there and I love it… Still missing polyphony pretty bad tho… [/quote]
It is what you make of it. The Octatrack isn’t meant to be a DAW, just like a DAW isn’t meant to be a realtime performance sampler like the Octatrack. I dunno, the only real trouble I’ve had with arrangement with the Octatrack is more to do with using Song/Arranger mode across three different step sequencers in conjunction with my other Elektron gear. Overall I agree that arrangement and mixing are far easier in a DAW, but it can be done on the OT in a pretty fluid manner.
You have a point but it still just baffles me that they omitted or went crooked with so much of the work flow in the OT os with aspects that are just bread and butter in so much other cheaper/simpler hardwsre/software. If I look at it as a ‘complete song’ making machine I want to smash it against a wall pretty quick, it’s just too limited/tedious and hard to organise things compared to arranging/mixing in a daw. but if I just use it as a sampler it’s the best thing out there and I love it… Still missing polyphony pretty bad tho… [/quote]
It is what you make of it. The Octatrack isn’t meant to be a DAW, just like a DAW isn’t meant to be a realtime performance sampler like the Octatrack. I dunno, the only real trouble I’ve had with arrangement with the Octatrack is more to do with using Song/Arranger mode across three different step sequencers in conjunction with my other Elektron gear. Overall I agree that arrangement and mixing are far easier in a DAW, but it can be done on the OT in a pretty fluid manner. [/quote]
Yep, I think a lot of my problems with OT are self-imagined and just expecting too much from it. As a performance sampler which is what it’s advertised as, it’s way ahead of anything else standalone out there. And I can see how for more minimal music than my own the OT would be pretty sufficient as a daw substitute. It just gets too messy for me to use in that way with my own workflow/music. Not really a fault of the OT, just bugs me which is human nature I guess 
Well, in some cases, maybe. But not all.
At least not in mine 
My perfect hardware is a classic workstation keyboard in a groove box format. Yamaha made a few of those, way back when. Bring back the RS7000 and its likes into 2016, and that’s my perfect hardware right there.
The current Electribes are touching on this concept. The two of them combined comes pretty close. That’d be a 32-track workstation with potential 48 VA polyphony with each track capable of playing back four voices, 16 tracks of sample playback, each track with an individual fx, two master fx, audio in and rudimentary sampling as well.
All of it powered with batteries.
I’m just having a very hard time imagining that you wouldn’t be able to make pretty smashing music with such a rig.
I have one, have played with it on and off for the last year. Seriously considering getting rid of it (Denmark if anyone is interested 
). Here are my thoughts:
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I didn’t find it as hard to learn as I thought it might be, reading some online opinions. I was making beats pretty quickly and using more advanced features without too much trouble. Although I think it is the only piece of equipment I have done more than just glance at the manual, so it’s clearly less untuitive than most.
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I don’t like working in the fixed loop/pattern format. It’s ok for drums, but I find it limiting for pretty much anything else. There is the timing divider thing, sacrificing resolution for pattern length, but I find it annoying. This is obviously a personal style and possibly music genre thing.
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I can get much better sounding results quicker on a computer.
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The ‘amazing’ sample mangling abilities are not all that revolutionary. Not if you’ve ever got creative with software.
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It turns out what I really want is a more traditional sampler.type device, not a 8 track monophonic sampler.
Saying all that, I’ve heard some very inventive, non-pattern-y sounding and great sounding music come out of these things. I guess if it was my only choice, I’d spend more time and maybe master it. But it’s not
I’ve sold mine because of no instant gratification and not enough time to learn/practice when my son was born.
I tried to replace it with push->push2 with no success and now I’m selling my push2 to back to octatrack 