Octatrack: MIDI Arpeggiator w/ Mutable Instruments Ambika
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- čas přidán 22. 01. 2019
- This tutorial examines the features of the Octatrack MIDI arpeggiator, a very modular sequencer-within-a-sequencer. The generative possibilities for melody, harmony, and rhythm using the Octatrack MIDI sequencer/arpeggiator are extremely vast, but due to the blasé appearance and non-obvious feature set the power and flexibility is easily overlooked. Somewhat obtuse and seemingly non-musical design decisions also make the arpeggiator rather unintuitive but I feel that overall these choices were made in order to offer significant power and variety to the end-user.
0:51 - basic MIDI setup
1:38 - MIDI arpeggiator
10:01 - LFOs for modulating MIDI sequencer and arpeggiator
13:44 - Ambika to polyphonic
16:57 - FX application
17:48 - re-sampling arpeggiator-generated audio
23:38 - sans narration arpeggiator demonstration
26:30 - Ambika to polyphonic
the MIDI synthesizer I'm using is a Mutable Instruments Ambika with six SVF voicecards, which I built some years ago from the original run of Mutable Instruments PCBs
the background intro music was created using one thru track to process the Ambika mix output, one generative MIDI track to sequence the Ambika, and two real-time re-sampling channels
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I miss you Max. I cannot tell you how important your videos were to my development. Thank you.
i 100% agree with this statement... i would have sold my Octa a year ago were it not for this channel alone.... :) ... and I also send thanks to you Max...
Best arp video on the tube. Thank you
Thank you very much for all of your illuminating tutorials. I admire how much you push these machines and find hidden beauty
It's so damn good. I've sleep for a while, then rewind and listen again. Music full of happiness. Thank you!
Thanks for the breakdown! As others have said you have helped demystify my OT just a little bit more.
This was a helpful and explained tutorial. Thank you.
It’s lovely. Thanks for this video and all the others. It’s not just about the OT, it’s about music. Deep respect.
Thank you Max. I really admire your way of understanding and explaining all the features of this extraordinary machine. From the clarity that your careful choice of words brings to the learning process, to the wonderful and passionate details of your creativity, watching your tutorials has not only helped me understand the secrets of the Octatrack's marvelous structure, but also rejoice myself with the structure of a beautiful mind devoted to unlock those secrets and share them with the world.
Wow man. This is the best video about the arp on the Octatrack. So much stuff to try. Thank you 🙏🏼
The best video on OT arp. Well done.
Hugely helpful and inspiring. You've demystified elements of my OT and unlocked new ideas and sonic options, thank you.
my pleasure, thanks a lot! challenging machine to truly grok, but it's worth it!
Thank you for this, the octatrack is so deep
Excellent excellent video, very clear and precise.
Thanks for the effort, helping me a lot at the moment!
Just perfect tutorial.
that's mint. that end bit, jaeziz. 31.40 is evocative af :) 🙌
Beautiful tutorial, thank you! :)
Fantastic, I have both the Octa and Ambika and had no idea about this depth of arp modulation
and then once you dig into it you get greedy for more modulation destinations and sources :D
Yo max, I have gotten so much out of your OT videos. Thanks so much man! It seems like as soon as I discovered your channel you vanished… Hope wherever you are you are well brother! ✌️🎹🎶🎶🎶
shit, man. not only is this informative it's inspirational. thank you for all the work you do!
thanks a lot dude!! octatrack arp is a special kind of beast 👍
Very deep analysis
Ah, very cool little groove
must have watched this 10 times. Thank you man!
Ha me too. Where’s max gone!?
I know right?! It’s seems like I found his channel and then he vanished… ✌️🎹🎶🎶
Thanks for the effort you put into these videos quite inspiring stuff.. Now I need to dust of the old nord rack of mine!
thanks for watching! will breathe life into just about any synth, but ones with good multi-timbral implementations will really shine!
Very nice tutorial! Keep it up
thanks man, really appreciate it! :) :) :)
Great tutorial - having 8 of these arps is really quite powerful!
thank you! among about a few dozen other things I didn't even mention the fact you can layer the MIDI tracks and have multiple MIDI tracks sending messages to the same MIDI channel... !! I will need to circle back around more than once to this stuff to give it a fair shake and flesh out more of the potential :) :) :)
@@maxmarco that will be a golden tutorial. I await with anticipation.
@@maxmarco please do.. circle back around and go through the functions
Brilliant!
Great vid Thanks !
You sound like Noam Chomsky laying down some solid tips for the Octatrack 😎
Oh man. Kinda does. Now I can’t unhear it haha
amazing. thank *YOU*
Thanks, really helpfull!
so musical Thank you... good inspiration
thank you! the Octatrack arp is pretty absurd!
amazing! thx~
Hi Max, I also have Ambika, a few pieces of Ambika, and I'm thinking of buying Octatrack. I'm looking for a usable sequencer to control hardware synthesizers and Octatrack seems to be usable. Thanks a lot for this video ;)
Thanks for these videos! Some of the other tutorials out there are too scattered and unplanned
my pleasure! .... hehehe that's pretty much how I feel about my own octatrack videos as well... always feel I could do a lot better... not easy machine to demo!! xD
27:24 your videos are amazing, thank you.
love throwing an Octa midi arp on my JD-Xi drum channel for a quick fill or just to hear the madness after applying an LFO to TRAN.
yeah man!! MIDI arp on percussive sounds is a great tip! Love that stuff!! Controlling other gear like that is awesome, so many possibilities with Octatrack MIDI arp!! In general the OT is such an amazing MIDI sequencer that unfortunately tends to be overlooked and hugely misunderstood - eventually with some more videos hopefully I can help a bit with some of those erroneous impressions :) :) :)
I would happily watch any videos you put out on the octatrack. I totally agree about the underutilization of the octa's midi sequencing. It blows my mind that I can have that sucker hammering away on 8 other midi tracks at once. OH, also the CC learn function and you can record knob tweaks?!? As you know this isn't even the half of it.
One of the limitations I've run into with the Octa's midi tracks is not being able to overdub live recorded midi notes. You get 4 notes per trig, but you can't layer notes up overtime. AFAIK You can only live record all four notes to each step simultaneously. Otherwise everytime you play a new note it will overwrite whatever was previously recorded. For example, let's say I have a 16 step sequence and live record four on the floor. If I try to add a clap to the kick on steps 5 and 13, the midi note for the clap overwrites the kick. However, if I intentionally play the kick and clap at the same time it'll record both! Ah!
Everytime I watch a video of someone chewing through a problem on the octa I spiral into a fit of inspirational productivity. "Oh shit, that's right you CAN do that, now what if I do it like this??"
super great info, thank you!! That's an aspect of Octa MIDI I haven't quite explored yet, although I have some ideas I'd like to eventually try out so that's amazingly helpful to know!
hugely deep device, so many aspects to it that I think it can only be 'mastered' in the context of particular ways of working - there are dozens of features I have barely even used even though I know they represent a vast amount of untouched possibilities
Great video! Question - can I send the midi output of one arpeggiator to the input of another? (or muitiple others?)
That fully featured arp is what is missing from the Analog4.
there are no plocks for the arp on the a4.
by the way the speed parameter decides the lenght of the arp midi setup note lane. With 6 it playing the full range, with set to 12 its only playing the first 8 steps.
Nice videos , Quick question: Can you play on different midi channel at the same time ? If yes , how ? Thank you
Thanks for this tutorial. One thing I can’t get is the relationship between the 4 notes on the main page and the sequence in the note offset setup page. What exactly is going on between the two?
Ok I have answered my own question… it offsets the note, which is what it says in the manual, but I couldn’t get it. So it first plays the 1-4 note arp as entered on the note page, then any settings made on the arp setup page will offset (or mute) the note in addition to the initial arp settings.
Incredible!
Where have you been?
Miss him so much lol
what sense make it to call the range in cents 10 20 30 40???
where are the midi arp ssettings stored?
Is this the same functionality as the arp in the monomachine?
the MNM arp is more simple overall, although there's probably a lot more you can do with it than immediately meets the eye - I haven't yet dug into using MNM arp + MIDI loopback, so I'm not really sure what is and isn't possible
I wish the a4/ak arp would let you p lock it’s settings :(
I've never really used one but it is surprising to me that based on what people have said the A4 didn't get a very beefy arp - does it have any advantages over the OT arp?
how do you apply the fx to the midi signal? 17:00
by putting FX on the thru machine that I set up in the beginning of the video to route the Ambika audio through the Octatrack
@@maxmarco thanks!
hi there, can the ocatrack transpose track?
there are two ways to transpose MIDI tracks - the MIDI track TRAN parameter, or by using arranger and its transpose function
The potential power this has for external gear control is obscene
I originally got an Octatrack simply to control and sample my modular gear - after some years of using it though I find the real magic happens fastest and easiest when standalone
yes instead of push encoder works better.
Can't believe I've never noticed the distortion on the filter.
It's a real secret weapon! I'm sure they would have put it on the parameter pages if it would have fit as it is very unfortunate it can't be p-locked or assigned to scenes. I also tend to find it a bit more useful overall than the Lo-Fi effect distortion parameter, which is much more of a hard clip
max marco yeah it’s too bad about p locks, but I get it. At least I can work with it. I just find the lo fi a bit more harsh/digital? than I prefer.
definitely to me the distortion on the lo-fi effect is much more digital in sound as it is a hard clipping distortion reminding me a bit of solid state guitar distortion pedals, whereas the filter distortion is a bit warmer and less harsh as it seems to be more of a soft-clipping saturation effect, and is somewhat more similar to overdriving an analog mixer input
Can the digitakt do this ?
No the digitakt does not come with an arp.
Anyone else hear The Addams Family @9:50
Hmm I’m thinking I’m gonna have to try this with the rytms dual vco machine....
how much octave range does that offer? it's fun to loop back the arp so you can use it on the OT audio tracks for example, but those only have 2 octaves of range which is a bit limiting. My eurorack sound sources usually have about 5 octaves and that's usually plenty but I most enjoy using the arp with something like the Ambika since it can respond well to the very wide MIDI note range that is easily produced using the Octatrack arpeggiator, especially under heavy modulation - setting up complex multi-timbral patches with varying note ranges and etc. to dynamically respond to the generated arp is also quite fun, definitely want to cover some more in-depth approaches to using the arpeggiator at some point in the future
max marco I just realized this lol I’m like wtf isn’t it working?! Had to go way low....
haha! yeah usually analog VCOs will only respond to a handful of octaves - still a lot of fun to be had sending the arp to them though!
max marco I could t read your whole reply earlier....I think it’s only 2 or 3 octaves....what might be cool is using an lfo or plocks to control the “detune” to add chords or other weirdness...maybe it’s a bit redundant but it’s kinda odd using the pads on the rytm too. I barely know what I’m doing so there’s that too lol
hahahah! sounds like you have a pretty good grasp on things - I'm not sure how the Rytm interacts with incoming CCs combined with scene changes - could be quite some complexity there. MIDI CC sequencing/modulation combined with the OT arp definitely blows things wide open, and the OT is happy with using multiple MIDI tracks to send messages and overlap notes on the same MIDI channel, so you can have a ton of modulation and sequencing all going to the same device on the same MIDI channel - I think the only CC I modulated in this video was a bit of velocity, but the world is your oyster when you start digging into the CCs - although once you start getting really fancy you might start to run into the limitations of MIDI bandwidth! :D
1-8 ...audio cc...fuck me....solved thanks!
thx for tips, I still do not see how you can use that is a track and sound good even in a techno track, all this sounds terrible to me.