So it’s been almost a year since I bought the Octatrack. At the moment I am comfortable with the machine, however I tend to keep doing pretty much the same thing over and over.
In other words, my workflow with this complex and capable machine is not doing it justice.
So I decided to take my music making cap off and put on the experiments cap on and just experiment with the machine.
My questions to you are:
What is your favourite thing to do on the octatrack?
What do you find to be the best use of the machine for your own purposes?
I though we could have a meaningful conversation around these questions and inspire one another in using this very personal machine.
Some of my favorite sounds I’ve gotten have been from slicing up a drum beat (usually a breakbeat, gotta love those breaks), setting up a bunch of probability trigs, and have a random LFO sent to the slice being played, rate, and number of repeats. having the crossfader set to repeat time, and sending that audio out to my Shermanfilter bank. Sounds downright massive. Reminds me a lot of the percussion in later albums by Gridlock. (I.E. Formless, Further)
add echo freeze delay and you have your own angry robot drummer!
I load up a bunch of long samples, slice them and then find ways to arrange the bits into something somewhat meaningful. I can jam out on bits of dialog and found sounds all night long.
This is a lot of fun. I’ve been setting a bunch of one shot record trigs on a track and playing old infomercials/random poetry/any random shit on YouTube into a+b from my phone, then just playing with trigs/fx, rearm track when I get bored of it and it changes completely, repeat across multiple tracks and make some weird stuff. Resample, trim and save a bunch of things, make them into a sample chain and load it on a track, modulate slice playback with LFO/crossfader, chop a break to play with it, probability for drum variations. it’s just never ending
Something. I like to do when I’m actually making beats and not experimenting/sample digging is taking a nice sample and making slices, putting a few trigs down and assigning slice number to the cross fader. Then I can just jump around slices with the fader. Gives it a more freestyle less repetitive way to make chops which is cool for hip hop.
Often I’ll make a nice swingy kick/snare pattern and modulate the hi hat volume slightly with an LFO, turn on independent track lengths then set the hihat pattern to 9/16 and set a few trigs to random probabilities. gets a really varied groove going quickly. Another thing I do quite regularly is time stretching my samples drum loops till they’re all dirty and stretching samples over it into demonic territory. Highly resonant high pass filter with base dialled up a touch gets the room wobbling. A lot of people slate the time stretch on OT but I like it how it is, I can do cleaner time stretch elsewhere if needs be. It has character
I find the OT is best used for making weird noises and accumulating 400 projects called variations of “ü” cause it looks like a smiley face
My fav is sequencing other gear. Arp, Lfos and seeing how much of the lo-fi i can get away with. I don’t use it (or samplers) as much as other gear, but still like it alot, and like the power. powaa. mk1 here.
Yes! In some contexts the octatrack allows you to input ‘illegal’ characters that even it rejects!
But it’s the thought of some bullshit messages about ‘files unable to copy’ in some later backup operation that keeps me well away from the exotic characters!!
My favorite things to do…mmhh…getting lost within the OT, diving deep in and then getting after a subjectively felt short time the steadily increasing and echoing shout from my kids or wife saving me from being sucked-in furthermore, then stepping away from it and realizing I still did not finish anything, although my brain wants to convince me most of the time that I had actually quite some fun.
Well disparate means using different sounding sources, mangle them via editor/lfo/fx neighbour tracks/wild ouch differences, start points, repeats on fast retrig etc and then have the fader operate the changes between the said processing, this will more than often create a nice texture, experiment is the process
So take 3 or 4 (or 8) samples of whatever. I just like using sources that are very different from one another…cause why not. Maybe setup a one-shot trig for all, turn loop on and hit play. Ok now there’s probably a big mess. So start mixing and mangling with FX and trigs and whatever. Now setup some scenes with some choice parameters that would benefit with crossfader play.
Now setup a record buffer to record CUE. Now send them all to CUE. Start recording the cue. Play the crossfader.
“Instant” panoply of sound.
With MIDI loopback - crossfader, cue level, arm record - endless…
This is a lot of fun. I’ve been setting a bunch of one shot record trigs on a track and playing old infomercials/random poetry/any random shit on YouTube into a+b from my phone, then just playing with trigs/fx, rearm track when I get bored of it and it changes completely, repeat across multiple tracks and make some weird stuff. Resample, trim and save a bunch of things, make them into a sample chain and load it on a track, modulate slice playback with LFO/crossfader, chop a break to play with it, probability for drum variations. it’s just never ending
