#325

oh cool idea. well there are two things the octatrack does that i love.

  1. parameter locking step sequencer with probabilities.
    i love having steps in the 16 step sequence control sample start position, sample rate ( pitch and time together ). its also nice to have an lfo randomly choose the start position whenever the sample is triggered by the sequencer.

  2. doing it live.
    the ot can lock al of these paramets to triggers in the steps ( even using probability to trigger or not ) while replacing audio in the buffer live. so at any point you can lock the parameters in to the steps and replace the audio with a push of a button so that whatver audio you replace in the buffer is now being manipulated by the parameters you locked in to the steps.

hope that makes sense.

oh also ! you have a norns right ! ? you can get a better idea what I’m blabbing about via the amazing takt script if you want !

1 Like
#326

Here’s a relatively inexpensive m4l device that is like buffer shuffler on steroids. Some great ideas here.

http://fabriziopoce.com/sliceshuffler.html

2 Likes
#327

Ahh yes I forgot about buffer shuffler and variants! It’s interesting that these sorts of tools mostly seem to be used to chop up and rearrange individual beats and beat subdivisions instead of bars or parts of bars (as I tend to do on the Octatrack).

#328

I find that most of what the OT does can be done easily with ableton. Workflows are of coruse different, but that’s anoter topic.
You can of course sequence samples, add automation to these, add fx, slice samples (simpler actually has a neat slice mode built right in) etc.
What Ableton can’t do the same way the OT does, is the ability to read from a buffer while it records and do stuff with that buffer and of course the probability sequencing thing @kin.sventa mentioned above.

@madeofoak the basic functionality (and @kin.sventa already explained a good portion of it) is that you have 8 recording buffers. You can record into these in various ways, either by pressing a REC button, using a guitar-pedal-style looper, or by setting a trigger in the sequencer that will intiate the recording.
You can have 8 of these and each track on the OT can read from any of them.
The intersting bit, as already mentioned above, is that the OT can both record to and read from the same buffer at the same time. Playback on the OT is controlled by a sequencer. Once you put a trigger on a step, the buffer will be read, and you can define the speed / pitch but also from where to start to read. You can apply an envelope, filtering, fx.
It’s a very powerful feature and people do use it in very different ways. If you have the OT record continuosly, you can use it to create an alternate version of what is going on another track or a group of tracks. You can quickly one-shot record a phase, then create a variation of it, then replace the buffer with another phrase, getting a different variation of it on the fly, you can use this as a beat shuffler or glitch effect. You can create a whole track by just playing one held note, have that recorded and played back by different tracks in various ways.

This one is actually on my list. I need to find a moment to check it out in depth yet though. Seems pretty cool at first glance though.

7 Likes
#329

OT can do this sort of realtime resequencing (altering pitch, rate, start position, envelope settings, etc.) fairly well but it’s definitely easy to cause playback to stop abruptly depending on the settings (e.g. pitching up a buffer as it’s being recorded). If elektron makes a new version of the octatrack, what i’d hope for most is a system in which you wouldn’t have to be concerned about these stoppages - the OT would make “intelligent” decisions about what to play back to get you as close as possible to what you’re trying to do. For example, if you attempt to pitch up a buffer that’s being recorded such that the playhead is located “in the future” it seamlessly switches to a previously recorded bit of audio. Granted, i imagine this would be hard to engineer, and you would have to expand the idea of a recording buffer into something like a “playback buffer” which acts as a composite of multiple recording buffers working together simultaneously. It’s not great for quick improvisation, but with careful planning you can manually make some of this kind of thing happen using the current capabilities of the OT. For example, alternating playback of two record buffers recording the same material to achieve near seamless backwards playback of live inputs (see Max Marco on youtube). Most OT users seem far more interested in manipulating pre recorded material, but it’s the live input manipulation that makes it worth the frustrations inherent in using this box.

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#330

a couple years ago i used ~karma + max for live to hack my own looper that decoupled recording and playback of an audio buffer into separate units. it was a step in the direction you’re describing.

now we have softcut ported to max for live and i imagine that something more advanced could be built from that.

none of these are ready-to-go solutions but perhaps somewhat helpful?

#331

ha yes, this is the one thing that really annoys me about the OT. As far as I can tell it’s because when you start recording into a buffer it instantly erases the whole existing buffer (although there is some weird ghosting that max marco showed in a video where you can get to some of that previous buffer… so the erasure may not be as complete/instant as i think)…
from a technical point of view if it just wrote new values to the buffer progressivley (sample by sample) you could then do some awesome stuff similar to what you can do with buffers in Max/Msp etc, it’s how i used to use my Aleph… with the OT it might get messy as you’d need to decide what to do about buffer length / timestretch values etc (if you record using HOLD for example)… but actually just an on/off setting for this buffer erase nide and a buffer length setting would keep me very happy!!! I can dream :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#332

if anyone wants me to I’ll add an option to ekphras to share buffers between devices

might accomplish some of what I’m skimming through here. in general tho softcut + ableton has room to be pushed much further - definitely want to spend some time with it for a future project

1 Like
#333

It’s really annoying that it deletes the buffer with each new recording pass. I mean, it does make sense if you want to do a completely new recording, but when you just have it record continuosly it shouldn’t do that. There is a workaround I think though. You can set up a piclkup machine on one track and set it to replace instead of overdub. Then you can use that buffer to do tricks on it. Haven’t tried, but should work.

2 Likes
#334

oh that’s a good idea!

(but if you change tempo it stops recording right? )

going to try now!!!

#335

You mean if you change the global BPMs?

#336

Have you guys heard of these “sample locks”? There may be something to this box after all.

It’s certainly not a feature that I learned about after using the octatrack for a while and trying to do exactly that a bunch of different ways and it was actually there the whole time.

…

3 Likes
#337

Yup! Definitely helps free up some drum tracks by smashing some into a single track.

#338

You can also put all your drum samples into a chain, and then slice it.
Octachainer is great make such chains.

6 Likes
#339

Brilliant. Chains are how I was doing “different samples on the same track”, and I kept wondering if there was a more straightforward way. Sample locks turned out to be just that, but now I know chains / slices pretty well as a result. :sweat_smile:

OctaTrainer will be much easier than trying to make the chained wavs on my own.

I love the Octatrack.

1 Like
#340

A few things I’ve enjoyed using the Octatrack with my 4u palette (Connected via Mutant Brain):

-Octatrack is my main sequencer which sends out pitch cv and gates on two separate channels. I can take advantage of Octa’s arps and great midi sequencer for two voices. Only issue I’ve had so far is that the Pam’s clock in starts to have trouble syncing with the Octa’s clock out if I use the arp on 2 midi channels.
-2 cv outs uses the octa’s midi lfos which is great for controlled modulation.
-6 Note gate triggers (2 per midi channel) which I use as cv gates. What’s cool is that I can set the length of the gate triggers on the octatrack and again take advantage of the midi sequencer (microtiming, retriggers, conditional/parameter locks, scale per track).
-I send two separate line outs from the palette (one from the headphones 1u, another from the line out 1u) to two thru tracks on the octa for individual processing. Aside from fx processing, it’s fun adding steps and playing with the attack and release times.

5 Likes
#341

Awesome stuff, I just picked up a Mutant Brain to marry my OT and eurorack.

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#342

I love it. Super customizable and has more outputs than I know what to do with.

#343

Had my Octa MK2 for some days now, really enjoying diving in and sometimes not understanding at all why the stuff I feed it with sounds great.

But, I am having trouble setting it up as a multitrack async looper with multiple pickup machines l(3) without getting timestretching to previously recorded pickup machines every time I record into a new pickup machine. I’ve seen talk about async looping and the Octatrack earlier in this thread, but I couldn’t seem to find any answers. Does anyone have any pointers? Thanks!

#344

Afaik the only way is to use flex machines and trigger samples manually. This way you are not bound to the OT’s clock. Overdub is a bit hard to achieve this way though

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