Octatrack as an arpeggiator

I was digging through Octatrack settings and realized that the “plays free” feature is pretty useful as an arpeggiator. I never used this feature much and thought it was more for people who did ambient music to just fire off something that plays for like a half hour.

There are some things that make it pretty interesting. Plays free tracks can still be quantized to start on a certain beat or at the beginning of the pattern. This makes multiple plays free tracks able to sync up on alternating beats for example if the quantization is set to 3 steps we can get some delay effects.

Also the fact that the Octatrack can be set up for per-track pattern lengths make it possible to do syncopated beats from the get go by triggering a few tracks of different lengths at the same time.

I’m messing around with this a little bit and it’s got a lot of potential. I’ll see if I can modulate the actual notes in the pattern to form an actual arpeggiator but for now it’s really cool to be able to sync re-trigger patterns arp-style. This is something I was doing with the old Piz Plz MidiLooper plugin (super old and crashy now unfortunately, but I haven’t found anything quite like it).

Update: as I was researching for this post I came across this video which I’m now re-watching. I like the idea of slightly off loops running. I didn’t actually try this yet but I will https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAG5VrTPUxs