Your Favorite Thing To Do On the Octatrack

PS_1:
Forgot the comb filter. Fav OT fx. Forever thankful for transforming my metronome into a saxophone

PS_2:
Zeppelin is still awesome

6 Likes

Powering it on and off,because i love the start lightshow

8 Likes

OffT: Absolutely agree. When they finally got over their influences they did absolutely extraordinary work.

My point is it would all be cast in a much different light if they started suing people.

OnT: another favorite thing is to load new samples :fireworks:

2 Likes

Same here :slight_smile:. This Norns patch (Playfair) is so easy to emulate in OT, and that helped me a lot to mitigate the GAS for the Monome Grid/Norns combo. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

4 Likes

Yea the combfilter! :pray: It’s a synth engine on its own!

2 Likes

Sure. Let’s go for another OT challenge!
I post it in a few minutes…

2 Likes

I like to set up series of scenes as a ‘keyboard’ tied to pitch transposition of various samples

putting a custom scale into a series of slices lets you squeeze more out using the trig buttons as a keyboard also, since you can skip all the un-needed pitches vs using chromatic mode

7 Likes

:rofl:

New guy here, but I do that a lot! Can also give the impression of differing pattern lengths with a similar approach

1 Like

Challenge filter :wink:

that’s interesting…

Mixing!
…it’s a challenge I think, if you can get a good mix with depth, punch, spread, right out the box with all 8 tracks and all kinds of different sounds running and not have things leap out of the mix when modulating or pitching (scenes/Xfdr), don’t need the buss compressor…you got it going on. I tend to push individual levels hot off the bat though and end up working down.
Although plocking filter helps, and you can really narrow Q down to get a specific range…
always loved mixing and on the OT is bloody surgical, man.

1 Like

I have a hard time getting accurate EQs on the OT alone. Do you monitor the frequencies with your DAW while you dial the settings?

Nope, all by ear on cans from the OT. I guess knowing how the integers translate to freq’s is already documented, but each track/song is different, and it’s all relative.
Maybe starting out with a kick or something you know the response of, a baseline then working around that…like a reference track then dropping it out. But it seems to me trusting your ears and knowing your cans/monitors. A lot of cuts or boosts don’t make sense I think, in terms of the numbers, freq’s, dials and settings…but it sounds right. And personally I tend to not worry too much on the low end boost in the OT because I am just trying to get a good separation and add in post, most of the time it works out, lol. Lot of it is sound selection and having a good large pool to draw from to keep moving…not banging your head on something that won’t gel.
…And then, sometimes you think you have the mixdown nailed and come back to it a week later and…damn,…well, just load up the project and back to it. It still beats than the old days working with floppies and calling up OB fx settings, etc.

1 Like

This thread might be helpful. I added a plot that shows approximate frequencies for OT’s values (they are lin-log scaled).

1 Like

Thanks I’ll check it out. I currently just monitor the sounds with my computer and mostly just use EQ in the OT to cut bad frequencies. More complex stuff is done in the DAW with FabFilter EQ.

My favorite thing to do with the OT, is when my friends send me videos of how they’re progressing with music making- I like to sample that in and make a song with it. It’s like a crazy hybrid love of friendship and music making.

Granted- it was just one friend that sent me a video, and she just sent it one time…and she’s apparently stopped learning the violin…

…I hope it wasn’t the track I made that made her stop playing…

6 Likes

I was going to mention something along those lines- a lot of the house shows I attend and cassettes I come across are chock full of illegal AF samples.

I guess there is a significant group of people who realize next to no one is listening.

2 Likes

A ton of footwork guys use commercial samples too. Literally the entire last Cakedog record is unapologetic top 40 rap samples.

2 Likes

Hahaha - made my morning here :ecstatic:

1 Like