Max, thanks again for a great walkthrough. Your octatrack videos are a life saver for those like myself, who learn more effectively through watching something happen rather than trying to comprehend the sometimes dense manual. I've only had this beast for 4 months and I feel like I'm miles ahead of where I'd be having not seen your videos. Keep up the great work man!
Here is a fun thing I have been doing that I wonder if it's work making a video for: I make a sample chain of 64 notes in a scale and slice them up on the OT. Then I play in a melody, nothing special so far, but I add scene locks so the melodie changes with the crossfader. I lock the slice to just one note and I lock the LFO (which is set to sample slice) depth and speed up to some value from zero. So on one side of the crossfader is the original melody and on the other end is a LFO melody and in between is a glorious hybrid. It really has been useful for making variations on melodies and stumbling across new ones.
Very cool approach! It's very interesting stuff, definitely worth making a video about. A couple of my early Octatrack vids on generative melody/rhythm allude to similar techniques so it's been a topic I'd like to eventually cover more explicitly. I've used some of those techniques to produce/perform some of the Octatrack recordings I've published to this channel. In general I think using the crossfader to control the depth and speed of LFOs is often overlooked
@@maxmarco Yeah, it seems like a lot of people only use scenes to add that stuttering delay effect or crossfade from an external source to a live loop of the same thing.
Hello sir - I hope you’re well.. I just received my OT, and I’m slowly getting my head around it, but I’d like to ask you - it appears you altered the brightness/contrast of your OT, and it looks awesome, but I have poor vision and my unit appears to be the standard - dull. If you did alter the contrast, may I ask if it was a tricky procedure to complete? I don’t think I’d manage to alter my own, but I know someone who would be able to, but any input from yourself would be amazing. I also have to say, your mastery of the OT is truly inspiring, and I wish you nothing but good health and fortune for your future.
Great video. Would appreciate a bit more volume on the instrument in comparison to your voice. Can barely hear it. Though it did get louder as the video progressed. Edit- Ok, spoke to soon. It gets loud by the end.
my production sessions often have a very wide dynamic range; I do make some subtle gain edits between sections when editing videos like this (some sections are as much as 4 dB louder than the level they were recorded at) but if I completely smoothed out all the gain/level changes then when I get to adjusting compressors etc. it won't make as much sense in context and it's important to me to demonstrate the amount of gain/saturation that gets applied to each sound
Just got the mk2 in today. I’ve been sucked in for 5hrs with a few breaks in between. Still going at midnight now working on getting my sample’s from my DT over to the OT Glad I was able to keep my DT, I’m loving the OT aside from all the reading I did just to test the machine’s card and ports but already got down how to playback samples with your tutorials I watched previously. Now I know why you have 2yrs learning it. But it’s like the ultimate musical RPG to me and I’m leveling up as quick as I can. Thanks for all your helpful tutorials Max, I’ll let all the commercials play through as I watch for your ad revenue.
I'm still learning OT - anyone that thinks they ever have the OT all figured out is clearly not a very curious person :D Re: ads, thanks much for the support but to be perfectly honest it'd be far more efficient for you to simply use adblock and throw me some $ on Patreon or Paypal. A thousand monetized views may only earn a couple dollars; $5-10 tossed my way is the equivalent to watching thousands of advertisements and would presumably take up far less of your time. At this point a full year's worth of UA-cam ad revenue is far less than half of my monthly rent. Even streaming my Spotify releases on another device when you watch my videos would be much more effective/efficient than spending time on the YT ads. Regardless, thanks much for watching and enjoying my videos! 🤗
@@maxmarco Ah, I figured google was stingy but jeez. Yeah I'll do that. I appreciate the vids and your willingness to take the time to chat/reply. As for mastering the OT, agreed. I've seen and read so much and just kind of think of using it and the DT as the best musical RPG ever made, with infinite realms of possibility to keep me busy as well as really help me get more organized with composing and now I'm excited to work with my skeletal tracks that I can just about fill the 64gb CF card with.
Hello! Do you know a tutorial that tells how when we put a wav file in Octatrack, we can play it in its own duration? I can only hear 16 steps right now. What I want is to be able to play all of them if the wav is 3 minutes or 6 minutes. If you know a video please help me.Thank you! 🙏🖤💫
Man, I cannot decide whether to save to get an octatrack or machinedrum uw... sold a bunch of gear and have been using Tidalcycles (btw have you used this? I dunno if livecoding would be your thing but having watched a lot of your videos I feel you would get a lot out of the flexibility of it) Your comb filter synthesis vid had me so close to pulling the trigger on the OT. Really inspiring stuff!
Can you help me with a question please? If I have loops loaded in machine. What are the sample settings in order for them to play without doing anything even if I stop/start the unit. Several settings and I am not getting it right. I appreciate it. Link for live loop vid you made? Still have issues w that. Thanks
not exactly sure what you're asking/trying to accomplish - samples will loop infinitely after triggering if the machine is configured to loop, and make sure to check your envelope release/hold times, you will want them to be set to maximum (edit to add: also maybe look into 'plays free' tracks to disconnect tracks from the sequencer)
Really interesting Max. I'm still in the infant stages learning my OT mk-II, coming along though. On average, how many tracks and patterns do you end up using on the OT for a single finished piece?
thanks! finished pieces almost always use up all the tracks, I can only think of a single Octatrack recording I've published to this channel where there was an unused track (Spiritual Successor). Pattern usage is somewhat variable depending on the 'problems' I'm looking to solve or work around, but the way I usually do things it's rare to want or need more than 2-3 patterns for an Octatrack recording, it's not uncommon for me to use only a single pattern, and sometimes I purposefully choose to use only a single pattern. I usually try to remember to put in the video description how many patterns I used, I think there are at least 4 or 5 'solo Octatrack' recordings I've published to this channel that used only a single pattern. how many patterns used is somewhat meaningless though - for example it's very easy to use up lots of patterns for 'convenience' - for example copying a pattern and deleting all the triggers for one sound, simply to have a 'mute pattern' you can switch to in order to mute that sound without using track mutes or arranger mutes. My track 'Transient Spaces' used 2 'real' patterns and 2 'convenience' patterns for example, and the 'convenience' patterns are exact duplicates of the corresponding 'real' pattern, other than not having some MIDI loopback record trigs simply so those versions of the patterns wouldn't trigger re-sampling. So technically that piece used 4 patterns, but really it's only 2 patterns worth of musical information
@@maxmarco Thanks Max. yes, the OT seems very logically laid out to do tracks in many different ways, as you say using Mutes, etc. Copy Patterns. Copying just a single pattern is the most efficient way of building a finished piece, since all the work has gone into that first pattern, no sense in doing it over again with another pattern unless its an added 'Part 2 or 3 etc' to the entire thing. Very important to copy and save the pattern(s) a few times for safety sake as you work with it. In my early stages I am finding you can do a whole track with cloning just a single sample, which is amazing. You dont need hundreds of samples to work with.
Wow man. You have the best Octatrack Videos on UA-cam and I saw a lot. So hot stuff 🔥🥁👊🏼
Your tutorials always show me new sides of this instrument. Thank you very much for sharing the knowledge.
Max, thanks again for a great walkthrough. Your octatrack videos are a life saver for those like myself, who learn more effectively through watching something happen rather than trying to comprehend the sometimes dense manual. I've only had this beast for 4 months and I feel like I'm miles ahead of where I'd be having not seen your videos. Keep up the great work man!
Thanks for your time and effort !
Here is a fun thing I have been doing that I wonder if it's work making a video for: I make a sample chain of 64 notes in a scale and slice them up on the OT. Then I play in a melody, nothing special so far, but I add scene locks so the melodie changes with the crossfader. I lock the slice to just one note and I lock the LFO (which is set to sample slice) depth and speed up to some value from zero. So on one side of the crossfader is the original melody and on the other end is a LFO melody and in between is a glorious hybrid. It really has been useful for making variations on melodies and stumbling across new ones.
Very cool approach! It's very interesting stuff, definitely worth making a video about. A couple of my early Octatrack vids on generative melody/rhythm allude to similar techniques so it's been a topic I'd like to eventually cover more explicitly. I've used some of those techniques to produce/perform some of the Octatrack recordings I've published to this channel. In general I think using the crossfader to control the depth and speed of LFOs is often overlooked
@@maxmarco Yeah, it seems like a lot of people only use scenes to add that stuttering delay effect or crossfade from an external source to a live loop of the same thing.
when i saw the title thought you were sampling theneedledrop XD
nice work out 🎚️
Hello sir - I hope you’re well.. I just received my OT, and I’m slowly getting my head around it, but I’d like to ask you - it appears you altered the brightness/contrast of your OT, and it looks awesome, but I have poor vision and my unit appears to be the standard - dull. If you did alter the contrast, may I ask if it was a tricky procedure to complete? I don’t think I’d manage to alter my own, but I know someone who would be able to, but any input from yourself would be amazing. I also have to say, your mastery of the OT is truly inspiring, and I wish you nothing but good health and fortune for your future.
I thought this would be about melon
Great video. Would appreciate a bit more volume on the instrument in comparison to your voice. Can barely hear it. Though it did get louder as the video progressed.
Edit- Ok, spoke to soon. It gets loud by the end.
my production sessions often have a very wide dynamic range; I do make some subtle gain edits between sections when editing videos like this (some sections are as much as 4 dB louder than the level they were recorded at) but if I completely smoothed out all the gain/level changes then when I get to adjusting compressors etc. it won't make as much sense in context and it's important to me to demonstrate the amount of gain/saturation that gets applied to each sound
Just got the mk2 in today. I’ve been sucked in for 5hrs with a few breaks in between. Still going at midnight now working on getting my sample’s from my DT over to the OT
Glad I was able to keep my DT, I’m loving the OT aside from all the reading I did just to test the machine’s card and ports but already got down how to playback samples with your tutorials I watched previously.
Now I know why you have 2yrs learning it. But it’s like the ultimate musical RPG to me and I’m leveling up as quick as I can. Thanks for all your helpful tutorials Max, I’ll let all the commercials play through as I watch for your ad revenue.
I'm still learning OT - anyone that thinks they ever have the OT all figured out is clearly not a very curious person :D Re: ads, thanks much for the support but to be perfectly honest it'd be far more efficient for you to simply use adblock and throw me some $ on Patreon or Paypal. A thousand monetized views may only earn a couple dollars; $5-10 tossed my way is the equivalent to watching thousands of advertisements and would presumably take up far less of your time. At this point a full year's worth of UA-cam ad revenue is far less than half of my monthly rent. Even streaming my Spotify releases on another device when you watch my videos would be much more effective/efficient than spending time on the YT ads. Regardless, thanks much for watching and enjoying my videos! 🤗
@@maxmarco Ah, I figured google was stingy but jeez. Yeah I'll do that. I appreciate the vids and your willingness to take the time to chat/reply. As for mastering the OT, agreed. I've seen and read so much and just kind of think of using it and the DT as the best musical RPG ever made, with infinite realms of possibility to keep me busy as well as really help me get more organized with composing and now I'm excited to work with my skeletal tracks that I can just about fill the 64gb CF card with.
Hello! Do you know a tutorial that tells how when we put a wav file in Octatrack, we can play it in its own duration? I can only hear 16 steps right now. What I want is to be able to play all of them if the wav is 3 minutes or 6 minutes. If you know a video please help me.Thank you! 🙏🖤💫
Man, I cannot decide whether to save to get an octatrack or machinedrum uw... sold a bunch of gear and have been using Tidalcycles (btw have you used this? I dunno if livecoding would be your thing but having watched a lot of your videos I feel you would get a lot out of the flexibility of it)
Your comb filter synthesis vid had me so close to pulling the trigger on the OT. Really inspiring stuff!
What kind of card would you recommend for buying for the Octa MK2? Is the stock kemp not ideal?
I've only used the stock cards in my Octatrack mk1s
great tut mate.
Can you help me with a question please? If I have loops loaded in machine. What are the sample settings in order for them to play without doing anything even if I stop/start the unit. Several settings and I am not getting it right. I appreciate it. Link for live loop vid you made? Still have issues w that. Thanks
not exactly sure what you're asking/trying to accomplish - samples will loop infinitely after triggering if the machine is configured to loop, and make sure to check your envelope release/hold times, you will want them to be set to maximum (edit to add: also maybe look into 'plays free' tracks to disconnect tracks from the sequencer)
@@maxmarco Thanks man~ I really appreciate your videos.
Really interesting Max. I'm still in the infant stages learning my OT mk-II, coming along though. On average, how many tracks and patterns do you end up using on the OT for a single finished piece?
thanks! finished pieces almost always use up all the tracks, I can only think of a single Octatrack recording I've published to this channel where there was an unused track (Spiritual Successor). Pattern usage is somewhat variable depending on the 'problems' I'm looking to solve or work around, but the way I usually do things it's rare to want or need more than 2-3 patterns for an Octatrack recording, it's not uncommon for me to use only a single pattern, and sometimes I purposefully choose to use only a single pattern. I usually try to remember to put in the video description how many patterns I used, I think there are at least 4 or 5 'solo Octatrack' recordings I've published to this channel that used only a single pattern.
how many patterns used is somewhat meaningless though - for example it's very easy to use up lots of patterns for 'convenience' - for example copying a pattern and deleting all the triggers for one sound, simply to have a 'mute pattern' you can switch to in order to mute that sound without using track mutes or arranger mutes. My track 'Transient Spaces' used 2 'real' patterns and 2 'convenience' patterns for example, and the 'convenience' patterns are exact duplicates of the corresponding 'real' pattern, other than not having some MIDI loopback record trigs simply so those versions of the patterns wouldn't trigger re-sampling. So technically that piece used 4 patterns, but really it's only 2 patterns worth of musical information
@@maxmarco Thanks Max. yes, the OT seems very logically laid out to do tracks in many different ways, as you say using Mutes, etc. Copy Patterns.
Copying just a single pattern is the most efficient way of building a finished piece, since all the work has gone into that first pattern, no sense in doing it over again with another pattern unless its an added 'Part 2 or 3 etc' to the entire thing. Very important to copy and save the pattern(s) a few times for safety sake as you work with it. In my early stages I am finding you can do a whole track with cloning just a single sample, which is amazing. You dont need hundreds of samples to work with.
Very inspiring - Thanks!