#232

…I am thinking about buying an octatrack to be able to play live my studio improvs which I won’t be able to recreate otherwise. I also would like to use it to play back my ableton live songs and mangle them live. Is it the right tool for me?..

1 Like
#233

Perhaps an LFO could do this, at least by LFO’ing the velocity for a kludgey version.

#234

An Octatrack definitely can playback audio, though it is an expensive way to do that. It is especially good at chopping or reordering audio in a way that feels like an instrument though. A simple case might be just placing triggers along the sequencer and setting the audio start point of each trigger. Apart from midi sequencing, that’s personally my main way of using the Octatrack which I find quiet enjoyable. If you wanted to prepare more ahead of time you can go in and set specific slice points for audio so you can quickly trigger certain slices. This works better for slices than treating them like cue points though. I think the main limitation you’ll want to be okay with is that your “clip length” can only be up to four bars long. There are creative ways of working within this limitation such as conditional/probability based triggers and playing back different tracks at different speeds.

I hope there’s a useful piece of information in there somewhere. It’s late here and I’m not quite sharp enough to be concise :slight_smile:

1 Like
#235

So an octatrack is not able to reproduce entire songs or long samples, right? If that’s so that’s a deal breaker for me

#236

Static tracks can play days of audio, as they stream from the CF card. Flex tracks are more flexible, of course, but they reside in RAM and they’re limited in duration.

1 Like
#237

This is probably good news then. My dream was just to be able to play back my ableton live tracks in their entirety, maybe mangle some of the parts of the song and then jam on it with maybe a small synth…

I suppose I could use a static track to play the whole song in the background and then maybe play with flex tracks to add some movement? Does this mean I cannot mangle and play with the static track?

I am probably buying an octatrack for my birthday in May, but I want to be sure it is the right tool for me to get out of the box. Been buying a lot of semimodular synth and will buy a doepfer A-100 system in the near future, but I would love to keep all my synths in the studio, record tracks in ableton live and then play with them live only with my octatrack. Am I making sense? Is this an unattainable dream?

Thanks a lot

1 Like
#238

I’m not really sure I understand what you want to achieve. You want to send some random notes to the OT and then have control over which of these notes get played and which not? Kind of a filter?

You can totally do that, but there’s caveats.
I can see two options for what you want to achieve (if I have understood that correctly, that is).

Option 1: play stem tracks or even a full-length backing track

In this scenario you’d render out your Ableton project as either one WAV file or a set of WAV files (eg. one for drums, one for bass, etc.)
Cuckoo has a good video about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJp23bq1FdE
But that’s just one way of doing this. You can also use one-shot trigs on tracks.
You can do several things with this appraoch: playing the mixer is one, i.e. you can fade parts in and out or mute/unmute tracks, if that’s your kinda thing.
Another thing would be FX processing and resampling. It’s relatively easy to set up a track to record the master or CUE output and then slice and dice that to your liking. The OT’s fader is your friend here, but you can also attach an external MIDI controller for more control.
I would probably try and keep everything in one part. I find that parts are not great when you do this kind of stuff, for reasons which I can get into if you want, but won’t for now, since it’s a lengthy topic.

Option 2: export individual loops/parts and recreate the track on the OT

This is probably the more flexible, but also more work-intensive option. Basically you can export individual loops, phrases, or even samples and recreated the whole set on the OT. The Arrangement mode can be very powerful to make complex tracks but still offer live-tweak-ability. Make sure you check that out. This is more or less what I have done for my live performances with kvsu. A lot of the material I performed live was just exported from Ableton and then recreated on the OT as an arrangement.

Personally I don’t find any of these two methods very satisfying, since it always feels more like playback than performance. But that’s a very personal thing. I remember there was quite a long and interesting discussion here on the forums about this…

Anyway. My personal view on the OT is that it’s a great instrument for live sampling and looping, but less for just playing back longer samples in the background (also not sure I’d spend that money to do just that). Some people do great shows by just putting their backing tracks on cheap MP3 players or tape recorders. Depending on your style of music, a couple of those, a good mixer and some cool FX pedals could do the same trick for a lot less money.

1 Like
#239

Very interesting reply. My main problem is that I am not really a trained musician and most of my songs I cannot reproduce, so I just would like to jam on them, apply effects and mangle them…at the same time I don’t want to cheat anyone and I wouldn’t like to just play back my improvs recorded in ableton live, that’s why I thought the octatrack is good for me…but I am having doubts

#240

I definitely want to know more :wink:

#241

tried that and the kludge was too kludge (cuz of all the velocity values between, say, 80 and 0 still resulting in notes).

apologies for my imprecision. rather than control over the notes, what I really want is control over which steps the notes play on. I’ve been envisioning something like a ‘conditional thru trig’ where i could define a rhythm that could mask an incoming stream of pitches such that the notes only play on certain beats but maintain their random (or otherwise generative) values.

#242

Not to derail the thread, but it sounds like what you want to do is what Ableton Live was already designed for - why not just use Ableton Live?

#243

Live does not seem as flexible as an octatrack, I don’t like to play with a mouse and you need to have a good laptop as well

#244

But a laptop, audio interface and some MIDI controllers might cost just as much as a new Octatrack.
This said, I can totally understand why somebody wouldn’t want to do live stuff with a laptop.

This might or might not be an issue for you, but let’s say you want to do the “long continuous mix” kind of performance on the OT. The problem is all parameters are stores in a part including the track volumes.
To sum up the major challenges I had faced when using long samples on the OT:

  • you need to plan things ahead. Once a sample plays, there sometimes is no easy way to stop it.
  • if you have a piece that is made up of multiple tracks (so you can fade things in and out and process them separately) making a nice transition to the next one can be a bit of a challenge, and – again – needs careful preparation and planning. A common trick is to use a track to sample the master, make sure that track is the same on all parts, and then sample the master, x-fade to this looping sample, then move to another pattern with another part, and x-fade back.
  • You can launch tracks independently like you would trigger clips in Ableton, but you’re always working inside of a track/part. It’s not as free and flexible as Ableton. There’s ways around it though.
  • In a live situation it’s sometimes hard to know where the play head is on a longer sample you are playing back. You need to go menu diving to see that.
  • In general the OT is a machine where you carefully construct and plan things in advance, not so much something you can jam on. At least in my experience. It can be good for jamming, but that’s more the live-looping/sampling part I mentioned earlier.

It should be said though, that for most things that you think you can’t do on the OT there’s some way to do them anyway :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#245

I’d second Ableton and midi controllers, way more flexible and better sounding. OT for me was always the long way round for no real gains. I could only use my OT when I had it by mapping everything to a faderfox uc4 anyway.

#246

Which midi controllers are you suggesting? I cannot really trust my mac to play live…that’s why I am thinking about an octatrack

#247

Any alternatives to the octatrack to gig live with your samples?

#248

I used a Faderfox UC4 and SC4. I use an Organelle now which suits my needs.

1 Like
#249

Do you have any videos to show me or can you explain please?

#250

sp 404 might do the trick for you… it’s not a piece that gets a lot of play with bona fide gearheads, i’ve noticed, since it’s pretty simple / direct, but you can have a lot of fun playing back samples and live looping/effecting them. also 1/3 the price.

1 Like
#251

I don’t have any videos but happy to explain, do you mean midi & OT