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
- Record from "A B" indicating a stereo pair
- Set a single recording trigger at beat 1 of a 32 beat pattern (2 bars)
- Use the "ONE" mode of triggering... which is hard to distinguish from "ONE2", so I'm just picking "ONE"
- And turn everything else off
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.
Listening back was a little confusing at first since I had the Thru machine going. To fix this, I muted the Thru machine and set a Flex machine to listen to Recording Buffer 1 and, importantly, trigger it on beat one as well. This now feels *almost* like a Thru machine except the last 2 bars are being recorded. To be clear, the Octatrack is doing something pretty cool here: it's playing the loop as it records it. This makes it easy to repeat a bunch of takes and then just pick the one you want.
Or, at least, that would be the story except my trig fires every single time and overwrites the recording. I couldn't figure out how to fix this in the manual so I had to google it and discovered the idea of one-shot trigs. These are trigs which have a state of being "armed" or "disarmed" (which is great to learn about since I'd been seeing those words all over the place and not understanding what they meant).
The idea now is to change the recording trig on beat 1 to be a one-shot trig and then arm it to record a loop. It'll disarm itself after one-shot (thus the name) and need to be re-armed (by pressing Trk1+Yes) if I want to overwrite the old loop and do a new one.
To turn a trig into a one-shot trig you find it in the grid editor (in this case by turning on the recording settings menu, selecting track 1, and turning on grid edit mode with the "big record button") and then hold Fn and press the trig. Now it flashes yellow and red to indicate it's a one-shot.
Immediately I started hearing the same two bars repeat. This turned out to be super annoying to me since I realized that with some of the randomness of the eurorack pattern it'd be a good idea to treat it as a four bar pattern. To fix this, I just went back and changed RLEN to 64 beats and re-arming the trig by pressing Yes (with Trk1 selected and the record menu open it arms the right trig automatically).
This doesn't immediately work as I also need to extend the pattern length to 64. If I don't, the recorder will record 4 bars but the sequencer will trigger that 64 beat pattern every 32 bars making it useless. To extend the pattern you hold Fn and press Page, tap page a few times to extend the length, and then press yes.
Due to the randomness of the eurorack patch it took a couple of takes to find a recording a liked, but then it was done!
Finally, as I noted above, I needed to make sure to save the sample which was as simple as pressing Fn+Rec3 and pressing Yes on "save this recording". Once it was saved it gave me a convenient menu to assign it to some machine. I declined, but realized quickly afterward and this would be key normally since my Flex machine responsible for playback now is still fixed to the recording buffer, not the newly saved sample.
Sampling and recording is obviously a huge part of the Octatrack experience and I think I'm just getting my toes wet at this point. That said, it wasn't so hard to get going and hopefully my stream-of-consciousness exposition above can be helpful to others trying to learn.