Elektron Octatrack Sound Design and Effects

You can kind of do 'granular' with the crossfader already.

Load up some (short) sound and slice in into, say, 64, enable slices, enable slice looping. Then map the crossfader to the slice number. Try it with a small bit of speech or vocals. Stick a short amp envelope on it, place some trigs, flick the crossfader around to change the timbre.

The Echo Freeze Delay in the Octatrack can function as a repeater. This is how you do it. On the Delay Setup page, make sure SYNC is set to 1, LOCK to 1 and PASS to 0. On the Delay Main page, set TIME to 16, FB to 127, VOL to 127 and SEND to any value between 2 and 127. As soon as you set SEND to 1 the repeater effect will be activated. Experiment by setting TIME and FB to various values.

So I just realised this yesterday, when I was playing around with comb filtering percussion.

This trick is most obvious if you're using little white noise samples, or something like an 808 hat.

1. Set up a track with the comb filter, turn the feedback way up, adjust the LPF to taste.
2. Go into the LFO page and set one of the LFOs destination to Comb Filter Pitch. Set the depth to 127, and set the shape to the Designer LFO for that track.
3. Now you can set up the LFO so it's an arpeggiator. With LFO depth at 127, the level you set each stage of the designer LFO at will be that many semi-tones. So if the Comb Filter's pitch is C3, and you set the LFO value on the first stage to 7, the pitch of the Comb Filter will be G3 (a fifth up).
4. Lay down your track trigs and set up the LFO shape and speed to how you like em. If you set it super fast you can get nice SID-type chord arps going on.
5. If you use different samples, you'll get different effects - you can make bowed string sounds with white noise that has a slower attack, or you can use pitched samples to get weird harmonic structures that are still following the arp.

I haven't played with it too much, since I'm working on a new set, but it seems like it's going to be a massively useful trick, and sort of makes me not want the 'Comb Filter Chromatic' trig mode so much.

So you guys know why the values for RTRG are set the way they are? 12-tone scale!

Get any sample you like, set RTRG to INF, and RTIM to a level that's the LOWEST note you want to play

Set LFO depth to 127, destination to RTIM, and then with the LFO designer, make your arp - a value of -1 on a step will RAISE the pitch 1 semitone. Use the amp to shape the sound for maximum synth action.

(the other way to do this is to set the RTIM to a level that's the HIGHEST note you want, and then a value of +1 on an LFO step will LOWER the pitch 1 semitone)

Set up another LFO to sweep the sample start point and you have a very usable graintable synthesizer.