I made a flow diagram that may be of use (see below).
As far as I’m aware it’s accurate - obviously it doesn’t cover everything, and it could be expanded, but it might help clear things up a bit. Happy to make updates if anyone spots anything wrong or has ideas to add more.
RizlaOctaFlow.pdf (142.3 KB)
FWIW, the OT made sense to me once I actively ignored everything I saw on YouTube or read about on forums and thought about how I wanted to use it. Its a box that can do so many things, hearing about all the different ways other people use it just kina confused me more and lead to some real analysis paralysis.
It might be helpful to first ask yourself a few questions. Do you want the OT to be:
The OT can do all this (and more) at the same time, but start by picking the use case that’s most important to you right now, and then start to explore. Once a new use case feels important to you, then start exploring in that direction.
It is a beautiful rage box. I’m genuinely fascinated by it intellectually as well as musically.
Like an evil riddle, it closes the door behind itself, because once you understand it, it’s hard to understand why you didn’t understand it.
Each element is simple. The way they fit together is fairly simple. Perhaps one problem is that there is a LOT of fairly simple things to know, and you need to know them ALL (or a lot of it) before you can get very far at all. So that’s hard work, with little reward until the huge huge payout later.
Fwiw I think… Learn to do one complete simple thing at a time. “I want to load a one shot sample into a flex track, and play it chromatically on the 16 buttons”… “I want to play that one shot in a sequence on beats 1 5 9 13, and change the pitch on 5 and 13… Then add reverb to it”… “I want to record a replacement for that one shot sample from input a”… “I want to record a loop from input ab, play it, then play it backwards”… "I want to slice that loop into 16 steps, then play the slices from the 16 buttons… Then record my playing… Then…
Seems like the octatrack is the #1 hardware for rage sale + subsequent buying back.
I swear I’ve read at least 20/25 reports of people that sold it and bought back at least once.
Edit: mine is coming in 2 days and personally can’t wait to start banging my head on it
Youtube: Amiga Samplers Budget dance music in 1990
This video was what clicked understanding the OT’s DNA for me.
oh my god. thank you so much everyone! i will systematically go through all of these posts in detail, but at first read, there is loads of good stuff here.
i’ll be honest, i still havent hit on that ‘key’ to open the labyrynth, and im definitely still stuck in the evil wizard’s riddle part, while he laughs at me threateningly. the annoying thing is, i know the answer is really obvious!
anyway, i know all of this will help, and i will go through it all, thoroughly, and keep bashing my head against brick walls until either the wall, or my head cave in.
gotta say, the whole thing reminds me of learning to skateboard. not sure whats worse, hitting concrete at 30mph or reading the manual and not having a fucking clue what it means!
still, i appreciate the wisdom and encouragement. onwards, one painful step at a time…
thanks @ptomaselli for your suggestion of a historical overview. really great idea. (and @Ulysses with amiga history). just watched the first promo video for the octatrack. right away, this made so much make sense in one foul swoop! best 17 minutes of my octatrack life!
i’ll post it here for anyone else on the same journey, and the rest of the sequence following that. like a trail of crumbs leading to the forest…
It’s one fell swoop.
also @Shredrr,
i didnt know what a ‘tracker’ was. it puts th OT in perspective. those things dont look that easy to learn either, so i guess we should count our lucky stars, things have come so far
huh! ive been saying foul swoop my whole life. thanks for the heads up but its probably a bit late to change it now. might just hang on to my eccentric incorrect cliches and make a collection. if i use them enough they might catch on 
idioms
wow. you guys really know how to make a guy feel like he’s getting everything wrong! i guess thats what i get for all my whining and blubbering!
you know what? im ok with it. i didnt come here to get everything right!
Or forget everything.
Keep it simple.
Use the OT like an old school SP-1200. Trig tracks default, turn quantize OFF, Live recording mode. Have fun. Only correct your mistakes after - read LIVE RECORDING MODE (to erase trigs in real time…) in the manual in full.
The main point is: once you get there is no such thing as one workflow on the OT you’ll feel happy, and not worry about it anymore. Just like a Swiss pocket knife you use one blade at a time.
There are different types of people.
There’s octatrack people.
Then there’s everyone else.
Welcome to the octaverse.
First establish exactly what you want to do, for the first project, don’t be overwhelmed with all the things it can do, you can do those later if you want.
Don’t bother with pickup machines.
Once you understand the structure, it tends to stick, I think most users who decide it wasn’t for them don’t get to this part, which is a shame. The single biggest frustration I see is when people don’t understand how data is handled, and rage quit.
99% of the time it isn’t the Octatrack that fucked up it was you, 1% of the time it was the Octatrack.
Preach 
I think the Octatrack is a lot like a modular synth but it’s like the recorder/sampler/looper equivalent of a modular. And I think just like with modulars there are essentially two modes of working.
The first is sort of an experimental approach where you sit down with a blank slate and explore whatever thing you don’t quite understand or haven’t tried yet, or you have a certain idea you want to explore. With a modular it’s like starting with nothing plugged in and thinking “what happens if a plug x into y”. With the OT it would be starting with an empty project and exploring some idea you haven’t tried yet like “what if I make a scene that does x”.
The second mode of working is when you have a specific goal in mind and you set it up to accomplish that task. If you have an idea of what you want to use it for you can just go straight to that and figure it out by asking here or searching. But the two modes work together. You play around and experiment, discover new things, and then you have more tools in your toolbox for when you want to be in mode 2.
This might be controversial but in a way I don’t think that the OT is really an instrument that you master. It’s more like a toolbox or a system that you play instruments into, kind of like a daw.
It’s also really not that hard, it just has some quirks that seem weird when you don’t understand why they work that way. I think the “history” suggestion makes some sense. Like it seems to me that pickup tracks were added later as sort of a template to be an easier to use premade looper rather than just learning to set up a flex track as a looper.
Just play and experiment, have fun, take baby steps, and don’t jump into doing anything too serious. I think people start out trying to make full tracks and then rage when they lose what they did. I’ve been trying to learn it by just doing casual experimental stuff and recording the output to another recorder so it’s no big deal if everything gets screwed up.
For example, I didn’t try the MIDI section at all for a while, so lately I’ve been taking one synth and the OT, and sequencing the synth via MIDI with lots of probability and making some kind of weird aleatoric thing, then recording it into a loop, adding effects, lfos, plocks, etc then changing the sound on the synth and adding another layer, and so on to build up some krell patch type of soundscapes. I’m using track 1 as my recorder and have all of the memory allocated to recorder 1 and then have all of the other tracks set as flex tracks so I can easily keep looping and building up multiple tracks.
But anyway that’s just an example of a “mode 2” type of system that I built up from lots of “mode 1” playing around and experimentation and thinking about what I wanted to accomplish.
Also just want to say…
It’s actually not though. There are plenty of synths that are far deeper than the OT and synthesis concepts and techniques that are far more advanced than anything the OT can do. Thinking that way will only hold you back.
How much of a newbie are you though? You mentioned using Max before? You at least understand basic concepts like various filter and fx types, envelopes, lfos, etc?
Why though? What specifically are you trying to accomplish?
Just pick a goal and figure it out. Don’t start with the intention of “mastering” something that is entirely open ended. In fact I would start by completely ignoring certain parts of the OT that don’t matter to you. Just like you could use a DAW for decades and make amazing music with it without having touched whole sections of the program.
1000%!
For what it’s worth, my $0.02 on the subject of how to use the OT …
If I were to buy one again and use it, I would take stock of the features I comprehend and think about what I then would like to do with the device and let the structure that emerges out of whatever feature(s) I select to accomplish the job take the wheel and guide the process, keeping everything as butt simple as possible, because features have a seductive power to make you think you need to use as many of them as possible. I would then milk that feature(s) to the maximum and make a recording of performances until something solid comes out. Make a little txt file explaining what I did and put it in the folder.
Then profit. Or something,
