Learning Octatrack

One more thing from last night that was a bit too boring to put into the main exposition: I upgraded the CF card to a faster one. The secret here is that if you have a suitably fast CF card then static machines can be used in most places and you can use the onboard memory. Since onboard memory is small (84mb) this can be nice. It's probably OK to wait until you actually run into the problem unless you've already got fast CF cards around, but I'll talk about it here anyway.

CF cards are, as a standard, maxed out. There will be no faster ones made. Further, Octatrack is limited in the size of card it can process. This could be read as a problem, but it makes it easy to figure out how to get the best performance out of an Octatrack: any 64gb 160 mb/s (or, equivalently, 1066x) card will achieve top performance for an Octatrack for all time.

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Hi,

Octatrack is an 8-track sampler, looper, effects machine from Elektron. It was released early 2011 and has garnered love, hate, confusion while producing lots of fun music. I've been reading about it for a while and came to impression that it was likely a bit of a complex, sharp tool. Here, "sharp" goes to say that you can easily do things that could be otherwise difficult... but you can also cut yourself if you're not careful.

I've been learning about music and exploring electronic music for the last year or so. Before this I was a drummer and a trumpeter with a bit of a love for jazz, but that was a long time ago and I believe in a lot of meaningful ways I'm coming into music more or less naively. I've been studying synthesis and theory and piano on my own time for about 6 months before deciding to dive in and try it out.

Since Octatrack has such a reputation for being difficult to learn, I thought it might be interesting to write about my experiences as I dig in. It might also help me to structure my learning.

I'm interested in using it to build more complex layering than a simple looper could. I'm always enamored with music built from groups of small loops (like Andrew Bird used to do in his live, solo sets). It'd be interesting to see how Octatrack supports this.

Anyway, my Octatrack MkII arrived yesterday so let me tell you about it.

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