OT + Volca FM

So... a bit late but finally I bought an Octatrack last month and I’ve been spending appx 1-2 hours a day. Well, I'm still learning every time I turn on this thing. Love it and I thought that, I could upload what I'm doing. Just Octatrack (well... with samples) and Volca FM.

This one has no samples, just Octatrack and Volca FM

octa is a demanding little creature, but will serve you well once you got your head around it. one can hear you're already on it.
i find the "background" sounds of 01a very cool. they somehow make the bed for everything else. love the ending too.
surely, 02a is a different thing, i like the simplicity of it. there is some digital distortion if i'm not mistaken, perhaps some strolling low frequencies? nice job!

  On 5/16/2020 at 8:26 AM, lapdog said:

octa is a demanding little creature, but will serve you well once you got your head around it. one can hear you're already on it.
i find the "background" sounds of 01a very cool. they somehow make the bed for everything else. love the ending too.
surely, 02a is a different thing, i like the simplicity of it. there is some digital distortion if i'm not mistaken, perhaps some strolling low frequencies? nice job!

Hey, thanks for listening! I love Octatrack. After years of making music on my computer, using softwares like SuperCollider, Renoise...etc, even though I see a lot of similarities with Renoise, it's still quite different and of course more limited, but I find it better to push the limits, instead of having near infinite possibilities.

And yeah, I'm still using my old Mackie mixer, which I've been using as a no-input mixer. That's why it's not so clean. I should buy a new mixer and use this one as a cheap sound source.

01a has an awesome Autechre vibe to it, and I love 02a. That track really makes the Volca FM shine... I'll never manage to make it sound that lush haha !

  On 5/16/2020 at 10:44 AM, Stock said:

01a has an awesome Autechre vibe to it, and I love 02a. That track really makes the Volca FM shine... I'll never manage to make it sound that lush haha !

That track makes OT's midi arpeggiator shine as well Thanks for listening!

Really dig the spatial sense of the first. Made me think of robots working in the kitchen of a crowded restaurant! I think you have a unique signature. 

The 2nd is really gorgeous, Basinski-esque. If you put an album's worth on Spotify I'd put it on all the time.

  On 5/16/2020 at 12:38 PM, chim said:

Really dig the spatial sense of the first. Made me think of robots working in the kitchen of a crowded restaurant! I think you have a unique signature. 

The 2nd is really gorgeous, Basinski-esque. If you put an album's worth on Spotify I'd put it on all the time.

Thank you for listening and for the kind words. I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed listening.

  On 5/14/2020 at 7:57 PM, lghticle said:

So... a bit late but finally I bought an Octatrack last month and I’ve been spending appx 1-2 hours a day. Well, I'm still learning every time I turn on this thing. Love it and I thought that, I could upload what I'm doing. Just Octatrack (well... with samples) and Volca FM.

 

Expand  

God DAMN that was fucking tight. I loved that!! Especially towards the end with the repeating beats, fucking sick shit dude. Really like how airy the synths are and how rock solid those kicks are! The ripping sounds that happen thru it are also super sick. Did you sample any windows sounds on this? The "ringing" synth sounds like this one windows sound to me.

But yeah, fucking sick shit dude, great job.

Octatrack - Volca FM - Axoloti

Octatrack - TidalCycles - Volca FM

really like 01a, all the little switchups and one-off sounds keep everything movin really nicely.  i'm the millionth person to say "i'm trying to wrap my head around the octa", but yea, this is interesting to hear, cuz the OT-ness really shines through

ighticle, would you mind talking about how you're shaping the sounds in the intro (sort of lives in the background after that too)?  really squishy and organic sounding in a nice way

  On 8/7/2020 at 4:12 PM, driftmark said:

ighticle, would you mind talking about how you're shaping the sounds in the intro (sort of lives in the background after that too)?  really squishy and organic sounding in a nice way

Hey, thanks, but to be honest, I don't really remember, how they were designed, but there are basically two tracks, which are live resampling of small chunks from other tracks via flex machines on OT. At the end I had two different drum loops: one main loop, the other one was live resampled one. I processed the first drum loop by using crossfader and the other flex machine was recording and playing at the same time. That's why, the second drum (resampled) track is changing a bit every other bar.

I actually started to use field recordings quite a lot, since I got new field recorder and omni mics. And there is this weird thing, when you make music with field recordings. Natural sounds have somehow more mystery, even though it supposed to be more familiar. They're much different than the first track, that I posted, but here they're:

They're all made on Octatrack, using only field recordings.

Yeah the Octatrack is most certainly a demanding box. I really like the dreamy quality of 02a

Field recordings go too hard fr. I need to use mine more often.

  On 8/8/2020 at 12:20 AM, lghticle said:

I actually started to use field recordings quite a lot, since I got new field recorder and omni mics. And there is this weird thing, when you make music with field recordings. Natural sounds have somehow more mystery, even though it supposed to be more familiar. They're much different than the first track, that I posted, but here they're:

 

They're all made on Octatrack, using only field recordings.

 

Expand  

Thanks for goin into it a bit, I was away for a sec there.  Yea, I totally agree with you about field recs and natural samples in general.  I think the brain has a tough time reconciling the 'more familiar' sound when it's totally divorced from its context.  i think its similar to how we react to uncanny valley stuff.  i just watched a doc about film sound design and it was really interesting to hear ben burtt, who did all the star wars sound design stuff, talk about how he wanted to use field recs to get away from the 'cheesy synth spaceship' type of scifi sounds of the 50s and 60s