Elektron-Users

I started this too quick after lab #4..and never got around to it. I still love to see some results so I changed the deadline to februari 14th 2014!!

Let's get this show started!

Great challenge! I used an old sample I had of myself singing some bullshit, as I didn't have a microphone around, hope that's cool. Have been working on this for the past ... what is it, 5 hours or so, and quite satisfied with it! It was a lot of fun to make, got completely lost in the process, fucking sweet!

http://soundcloud.com/happyleaguecactus/octalab-5

I like it a lot, very nice atmosphere and excellent manipulation of the sounds. It has a drone like quality, repetitive yet there is constant movement and increasing tension. Glad to see these lab assignments work in inspiring and opening up the octatrack to new users!

I just packed up my octatrack and am setting up my new studio next week.. first thing should be lab #5 and #6!

Great fun, great work!!! Congratulations!

Double post.

husc wrote:
I like it a lot, very nice atmosphere and excellent manipulation of the sounds. It has a drone like quality, repetitive yet there is constant movement and increasing tension. Glad to see these lab assignments work in inspiring and opening up the octatrack to new users!

I just packed up my octatrack and am setting up my new studio next week.. first thing should be lab #5 and #6!

Great fun, great work!!! Congratulations!

Thanks a lot, man! I hear now that the sound maxes out sometimes on my monitors, didn't do that on my headphones, hmmm, oh well, just a sketch. Inspiring indeed! Good luck with the studio setup and getting started on the labs - great fun ahead!

I'm very interested by this since I was planning to use my voice alongside the OT in my own music.
Is it acceptable to use a guitar preamp stompbox (Tech21 Liverpool) in a transparent setting as a preamp for the microphone ?

koyl wrote:
I'm very interested by this since I was planning to use my voice alongside the OT in my own music.
Is it acceptable to use a guitar preamp stompbox (Tech21 Liverpool) in a transparent setting as a preamp for the microphone ?

A pre-amp is a pre-amp in that case, you do however need to keep in mind there's a difference between microphone level and line level.

Do you have a mixer? If so, plug the microphone into the mixer and use an output (direct out, bus, aux, monitor or control room out) to connect to the octatrack. The octatrack has plenty of gain on the input to boost the signal further to a desired level.

The pedal will work, but it will also change the sound, this has to do with the characteristics of the pedal and impedance difference between a guitar signal and a microphone. A mixer won't change the sound of your voice that much and is in general better practice to use for a microphone.

I don't have a mixer but I just realized I could probably used my Zoom H2 portable recorder as a mic if I put it in Rec/Pause and use the line out.

koyl wrote:
I don't have a mixer but I just realized I could probably used my Zoom H2 portable recorder as a mic if I put it in Rec/Pause and use the line out.

That should work!


Another great trick is to plug headphones into an input and crank it all the way up, certain (big) headphones will give you fantastic lofi crunch and saturation:

Soooo, here is my track:
https://soundcloud.com/koyl/octalab-5-experiment-with-only

I had the intention to do something calm, pure and beautiful in a (let's say) Sigur Ros kind of way but, because of the way I recorded my voice it didn't really work.

The Zoom H2 being a field recorded, singing close to it distorded my voice and far from it made the sound too distant and undefined..
So I did with what I got and... well... what we got here is some kind of weird Industrial flavored hip hop/DnB track.

I'm not even sure I like it but the process was really interesting and inspired me to do some more (but with a real mic and preamp next time... I have to buy a mixer !)