They're a big deal. Super simple, adds lots of casual richness to your loops. Took years to arrive on Octatrack.
Turn on conditionality by holding a trig button, pressing left (or right) and then rotating the level knob. Conditionality includes a number of logical ideas like "fill", probabilistic triggering with "x%", and euclidean timing with "n:m".
Okay, after the the last post it's time to learn how to record. I've got a 4 bar repeating pattern I'd like to sample and just, for now at least, stow away for later. It _might_ even be a good idea to sample the 3 parts that compose it all separately, but first I just want to sample the mix.
I've got things set up as I did previously and so I am listening to the output via a Thru machine. I know that each track also corresponds to a recorder and there are these Rec1-3 buttons as well as various recorder setup things available by pressing them with Fn, but honestly I'm totally lost. Hell, for all I know it's already recording.
So, time for manual diving.
Section 9 of the manual is devoted to recording and talks about recording from a track and a pickup machine separately. Pickup machines are, to my understanding, Octatracks idea of a live-looper machine, so I'm going to ignore them for today.
Very importantly the manual makes it clear that if you don't explicitly save recordings out to the CF drive they will be lost. This makes sense as it's clear that there are lots of tricks to be had with transient recordings (and maybe resampling them and re-recording them and so on and on and on) but for now it makes me a little scared—better get in the habit of saving!
Anyway, to start recording it looks like we need to (a) configure our sources, (b) configure our sampling time, (c) configure the triggering mode, and... some other interesting stuff like fades and (time) quantization which I'll ignore.
The basic set up that I think I'm going for is
From here, you essentially hold a track button and one of the record buttons (either A-B or C-D) to start recording. But, rather than doing it by hand I'm going to, as stated, use a recording trig. To do this, I leave the recording menu open, go into "grid edit" mode in the sequencer by pressing the "big record button" (which refers to pattern recording, not sampler recording, ugh, this is confusing to write but simple if you try it), and then tapping the trig I want to set for recording.
The first time I tried this I accidentally had RLEN set to max which makes it, as you might guess, record the maximum amount it can. This, by default, is 16 seconds. Easy to fix though: just had to actually set RLEN to the right place.
The Octatrack can be a mixer/effects box pretty trivially. It sort of feels like a good first step on the way to using it as a live recorder/looper (which I think ultimately is a big sweet spot). The key to mixing/effects is the Thru Machine. They do pretty much what they sound like they do: they pass sound "thru" the Octatrack.
For this I grabbed a MIDI cable and plugged it into my eurorack. I wanted to grab clock and at first I thought something might be broken, but you have to go into MIDI settings (press Project, then go to MIDI) and turn on clock and transport sending, then it's nbd! I threw together a pretty quick semi-random drum loop and then plugged a stereo output pair into Octatrack inputs A and B.
From here, it was quick to get Octatrack sending the drum beat to the headphones and main outputs. To do this you set up a Thru machine on any track and in the setup configure it to listen to inputs A/B. Thru machines can apparently listen to a mixture of channels from inputs A-D though it's set up to favor the idea of A+B being one stereo pair and C+D being a second. In this case, I set the "How do I listen to A/B config" to "A B" which indicates listening to them as a stereo pair... and it started playing!
From here it's fun to mess with effects like reverb, filter, delay, etc. Even with a relatively constant repeating input there were fun things I could do with the scene fader. It immediately adds a new dimension of interactivity! From a eurorack perspective it feels like another giant knob and sequencer, but with lots of options and big buttons it's much more deliberate and inviting than the more experimental feel that you often get with individual modules.
I loaded up a longish horn sample a minute ago, one that came with the LOOPMASTERS sample pack in the built-in sounds. It's not too material what the sample itself was, but I was interested in fooling around with a longer sample. This one was 2.5 seconds long and about 3 bars.
To load a sample you select the track machine by choosing, e.g., track 1 and then double-tapping SRC. You can choose a Static machine and then press right to choose the sample you need. It's a little confusing and I still haven't gotten the hang of it since it meshes the selection of a sample into the current project with the selection of the sample for this particular machine, but fiddling about and pressing yes whenever you think you've got it will work. To test, you can press the Trigger #9 key—9-16 trigger the playback of a machines 1-8. I'm not yet sure what trigger keys 1-8 do.
Anyway, what I wanted to talk about were two of the most obvious and cool parameters on the Static (and Flex) machines: PTCH and RATE which affect the pitch and the rate respectively. They kind of have similar roles, so it's worth talking about how they differ.
Demo mode is contagious! I booted my Octatrack up today and even with a CF card loaded and without holding Yes it still booted in Demo Mode—whoops!
Turns out you just have to go to Project Settings and mount a Set and Project and then it will load that on boot the next time.