generative stuff is easy with trig conditions and using lfos or p locks to vary a sound over the length of a pattern.
i struggle with organic patterns too. even with eurorack. i think my point was that while you can do anything in modular, you can do almost anything in elektron boxes, but there are just enough boundaries to keep you making music instead of experimenting with weirdo noises without any directions (which can be cool, but ultimately doesn’t get me anywhere most of the time). my revelation was that it’s so hard to build your own system where everything works perfectly together and really takes advantage of each other’s features. so when you have something like an elektron box that has a lot of the fundamental building blocks of a creative modular setup, but it all can be routed internally and play off of each other, it seems somehow even more powerful than a jumbled collection of random gear. this isn’t a statement, as much as a half thought out theory that informed my current workflow and setup. i still love eurorack
i always use per track length. and then since i dont fully understand how swing or slide trigs work completely, i will use the “rate” destination on “one” or “trig” activated exponential lfos so that there is the illusion of the sample speeding up and slowing down on a per-step basis. i believe now that you can do tempo per pattern, using something like orca for norns to control the bpm of the octatrack via midi might be a lot more flexible. but yeah just by using conditions, varying pattern lengths, and then locking or modulation trickery with time parameters you can get a lot of movement and less linear feel inside of a grid. i’ve also recently taken the “quantize live recording” feature off so that i can manually quantize after recording in a midi pattern with my midi controller and dial in more realistic levels of unison, the same way i do with my other elektron stuff (which have better quantize features, by the way. not sure why the octa can’t have a quantize per track dial). i know this stuff isn’t new, but since you can’t technically use an lfo to drive tempo per track, which seems to me like one of the most organic ways to clock something, you have to get creative. but you can get pretty close by using them on a smaller scale within patterns
