How to use Octatrack for Backingtracks - Tutorial 

Make a template Just once and your set

+b trab 🤣

+badaszewski it's the effects page button + clear to clear it. It's useful.

+Dawless Jammin' thanks. This is shot with the Panasonic GH5. It's great.

+Tim Shoebridge yeah I see what you're saying. It all loosened up for me when I got comfy with the Analog Keys. Prior to that I just didn't "get it". I had the A4, loved the sound, but at the time I really craved a keyboard. So the Keys did it. For me it has for a long time been all about the sound. "If it sounds good, it's worth learning". But more and more it's becoming more about "the jam". "If it jams well, it's worth learning".

Try to forget all your previous experience programming synths/drum machines/etc And try to start fresh with an open mind. At first it seems a bit counter intuitive until you pass some time with the machine, make mistakes, explore it, play with it not really trying to create something concrete. This helped me a lot.

owning 5 elektron boxes, I can tell you the octatrack is the most headache inducing one. Cuckoo owns my patreonage to his ability to make me understand it better. The problem with the octatrack is that there are 1000 possibilities but you can only use 8 at once, there is no "default" way to use it, and a lot of the possibilities bring new problems. I was finally able to make a full song on it after sitting in front for 15hours straight (not an hyperbole) after I just got super inspired by some events. Words of advice: concentrate on what it can do, not what it cannot do (there is a lot in either camp and they can be equally ridiculous), RTFMx2, read a lot on elektronauts forums and watch a lot of youtube videos (especially dataline, cuckoo, halution, tarekith, bobeats, cabinet of curiosities... to name a few). I hear you about the interface and it getting in the way of your flow. I found myself feeling the same using an MPC and the best trick for me is to .... talk to myself while I'm using "ok, let's clear the page, copy, paste this pattern, now entering this or that mode, setting this, blabla" just pretend you're cuckoo XD... this leads me to one of the most important thing: ELEKTRON BOXES IN GENERAL WILL ONLY FLOW IF YOU SPEND A *LOT* OF TIME LEARNING AND PREPARING THINGS, they are *NOT* instant gratification machines, pretty much none of them are. Once you put in the work and master the thing, then you can freakin' fly. so far for me I kinda learn about possibilities for hours on the web, then sit down and try to apply the knowledge regardless of results. Be persistent and try to aim at learning functions and how they interract with one another rather than making actual songs at the begining. oh, and resampling is awesome!

@XC3N The Digi line is actually pretty easy and intuitive, they pretty much nailed it with this one, kept the gist of it while reducing the clutter. The sales speak volumes.

+Boxtape yeah it's great for looping. Search my videos for Octatrack and you'll see a few deeper tutorials and loop jams in there.

Yeah neighbour tracks is a great way of adding a whole chain of possibilities.

+Fabrizio Paterlini for live playing, its responding instantaneously. But for the use you're describing, more MPC style, perhaps, it's easier to just put it on the timeline in the sequencer.

You can do that when you change pattern, if you change the pattern any time before the end of the bar then the new pattern will start in time when the current pattern finishes. SO if you put one backing track on pattern 1 for instance and the next on pattern 2 then you can change from one to the other as you described

Press function scale setup, in here increase it to 64/64, inf, 1/8 etc etc play around in here. Good luck.

@@fluxus_tr 64/64 sounds like its limited.. have you tried it ? im getting the MKII now

@@fluxus_tr its in trig conditions, load the track via usb.. set possibility to 1st. bingo done. the whole track plays on what ever trig button you set it to (1-16)

Negative

If you use trig conditions you can set the trig to play every second time, every third time etc. Or you can set up scaling per track, and let this particular track play slower than the other tracks.

+GEW the Digitakt can't stream long stereo tracks from a Compact Flash card. It has to load mono samples into RAM first. The storage is 1GB. The RAM I'm not sure. Probably enough to do a few full length tracks. They're different

Your correct. Plus with out that hi-res slider (maybe in a Digitakt Pro version:-) the cool things you demo-ed would not be possible either.

Can you confirm that the digitakt has only got a 16 step sequencer. i can't find any mention of the usual 64 steps in any of the videos. PS Love your vids cuckoo. Your guide on sampling with the Octatrack has opened up the machine to me.

+oscillated it's like with the other. Four pages. Up to 64 steps per pattern.

Thanks for the info

lol

Can confirm

+GEW Overbridge is pretty cryptic too ;) But there's no Overbridge support for the Octatrack. It was the last instrument in the generation before Overbridge.

Ok, that is good to know. So I guess if your willing to put in the time, the Octatrack is pretty cool. Is there any current day piece of gear that would equal or surpass the Octatrak's functionality as a multi track system?

Digitakt (overbridge able) ;) but it has its limitations.... otherwise MPCs are pretty good at that, too.... but nothing can replace the octatrack. There is no overbridge for octatrack but there is a librarian software you can use to do more comfortable edits (octaedit) it's not free and it's not fast, but it can make a difference for some tasks.

If you just want to play backing tracks, there are heaps of things you could use, if you want a sampling drum machine, there are plenty of better things, or as a midi seq, there are plenty of better things. if you want to do some of the more esoteric live sampling/resampling stuff, there is nothing else that really matches the OT, in my opinion. Plus it's not that cryptic. It's easier than than the old elektribes, for example. where you need to rename all the samples to 00-99.wav You can drag and drop files from your pc with whatever file system you like.

You could use the program OctaEdit.