#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

2 Likes
#345

i would use flex tracks. I don’t see much of an advantage to pickup machines. They are even a good alternative to thru machines for grabbing the live buffer. I’m not sure if this answers your question but you kind of have to offset the rec trig and the playback trig with the micro nudge. this might help:

all of his videos are great for in the box sound design and more practical things like midi loopback and generative tricks

6 Likes
#346

Thanks folks, not giving up quite yet. Maybe @marcus_fischer can chime in?

#347

I’m not affiliated with the item below, I just stumbled across it while looking for some wood sides for my OT and thought it was cute:

5 Likes
#348

This has also bothered me for quite a while.

As I want to do
• very long recordings (= larger than the 512 steps one can do with Flex machines at the smallest Scale value),
• over which I want to overdub,
• without the OT changing the tempo and thus doing timestretching,
I can’t use Flex machines, but have to use Pickup machines, which I can only prevent from tempo-changing by preloading their recording buffers with empty audio files of pre-defined lengths. Avoids unwanted tempo changes for me. Yes, it is not as flexible as one would like it, but as the old saying goes: You have to die one death.

I’ve listed the necessary steps here. Hope this helps.

3 Likes
#349

Great hack! But this will only work with pre-defined loop lengths? Maybe one can do some smart and quick editing on the go to bypass that?

#350

Yes, this only works with pre-defined loop lengths.

I never tried to edit the lengths of these audio files during a live performance, that would take way too much time.

But what I do live is to stop one of the Pickup machines, load a different empty loop file into its recording buffer, then restart the Pickup again. This is also how I clear a Pickup machine: stop it, reload the empty loop file, restart.

1 Like
#351

As long as you don’t need overdub using flex is straightforward-ish to set up multiple loopers without predefined lengths and without worrying about tempo changes timestretching material. This process is made much easier if you use an external midi controller to map controls. It has been a while but for some reason i remember rec length had to be set to 64 instead of infinite but i don’t know why. 64 beats is pretty long especially if you set bpm to 30 (if you’re not using quantized recording the bpm can be whatever).

Dirty flex looping:
Set loop in playback setup to on, timestretch off. I have recorders set to quantize play and record to taste (I use Qplay 4, Qrec 4), but it can also be unquantized. When I press rec ab, rec cd, or rec src 3 it starts recording my loop on the beat (ONE2). Then I just hit the track sample pitch=0 button (note C6, see OT midi reference) and the rec ab, cd, or src 3 button at the same time to stop recording (quantized) and start playback (unquantized). The need to hit two buttons at the same time is why an external midi controller really helps. This doesn’t give me quantized playback start but it’s close enough for my needs and if I want to nudge it to be quantized I can use the onboard trig buttons in track keyboard mode, the track + play command combo, or drop a play trig on the sequencer.

Overdub is technically possible but very imperfect - need to record from src3 cue and setup feedback.

I had tons of start values, record, playback, length values for buffers set up on midi controllers and it worked pretty well. Essentially I was trying to contort an octatrack into MLR, and so when i discovered some of the max/norns applications here on lines I realized that these are purpose designed tools for what I was trying to get at. That said I still use my modular through OT rather than norns 90% of the time because it can do so many things simultaneously in a small package (fx, looping, sequencing).

3 Likes
#352

had some great fun using the technique today. I think I have managed to settle with this as a way to move forwards. just a quick additional tip to it, you can export empty loops from Ableton in your preferred lengths, then edit the bpm info on the Octatrack(remember to save sample settings).

here is an early (highly reverberated) dive into what this can be:


thanks again!
4 Likes