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.
An Octatrack arrives packaged with a USB cable, its power cable, and a smallish CF disk in a little plastic bag. I've also ordered a faster CF disk and a MIDI cable (for later). Up until this point I've always used MIDI over USB and I don't think Octatrack supports that. Additionally, an ultra-fast CF card can be used to minimize the distinction between flex and static machines, I've read.
When you plug it in and hit power it flashes all the lights in a splash of colors and then loads up the default project. This is a kind of funky bass number and you can hit play and it'll just dive right in.
Immediately I started playing with 3 things:
I started muting all of the tracks one by one to understand the design of the song. There's a drum track, a bass track playing a single 8-bar bass sample, a clap track, a bongo track, some rhodes providing splashes of extra chords, and a weird riser effect which happens every 16 bars. To mute, you press Fn+TrkN for any track N = 1 through 8. I also discovered that you can hit Fn+Up or Fn+Down to change the function of the trig keys—the 16 numbered keys along the bottom—all the way to performance muting mode to make muting super easy.
I started exploring scenes which is to say flipping the fader over toward B and hearing it mangle the sound. You can hold the B scene button to see what other scenes were programmed: on my CF card it was just 1 and 9 so there wasn't a lot of variation. Still, it's a lot of fun to rhythmically flop the fader to create interesting variation. I also could hold B and rotate encoders for various tracks to create new scenes (hold B and press a different, unused trig button to start designing a new scene) but I didn't really have good ideas yet. Most of what I did just randomly mangled the sound to pieces.
That said, even a totally mangled scene can be really interesting if you use just small departures from the A-side. Move it between 0 and 25 of the way to totally mangled and you can get just a touch of madness. My guess is that (at least for my ears) I should learn to program scenes more subtly.
I started exploring patterns by holding pattern and hitting the trig buttons. Turns out there's a lot of variation built right in to the patterns of this demo. It was kind of blowing my mind at first and then I realized that the choice of pattern also changes the part. At first, I confused bank and part and tried to change the bank to explore different parts. Instead, you have to hold the part button and then press one of the 4 arrow keys. Also a little confusing (but obviously useful) is that patterns don't change until the current one reaches its end. This can make exploration a little tough at first.
Generally just playing with these things was already a lot of fun and I could just play for 30 minutes, nbd.
I started re-reading the manual at this point and discovered the "getting started" section which more or less tells you to do what I just described above—so kudos to Elektron for making the device easy enough to indicate this sort of play all by itself.
But—the manual also suggests that there's a demo mode built into the device that you access by holding Yes while booting without a CF installed. This was super exciting! That means there are two whole projects I can just explore!
Unfortunately, when I went to take a look at it I discovered that it's the same proeject that's installed on the CF they provide with the device. The only easter egg was that the built-in version had 16 preprogrammed Scenes to slide between which was a bit more exciting.
Pretty fun for the first hour or so!