Elektron Octatrack MKII Black

After 10 years Octatrack is still a great tool for electronic music. It definitely has its limits, while there was a lot of updates on the sequencer and secondary functions, still no new effects or sound engines and no plans for that (supposedly limited by the CPU & RAM). The overall sound quality is also a matter of long debates.
But it is still stronger in sound design and performance features than the competitors like Akai or Pioneer. The advanced looping/recorders feature there is still unique and it's more fluent and flexible in connectivity and immediacy of sound creation (despite the complexity). And no so many devices on current marktet bring you 3 LFOs per instrument.
There are better tools for techno or hip-hop, but there are no more flexible texture-builders, remix stations or glitch machines out there.
The MK2 brought very nice upgrade to the physical part which worth the price (which in my humble opinion could be a little bit lower).

As Batman once said: “Does it come in black?”

Well yes. Yes it does!

If you are familiar with this machine you know exactly what to expect. Owning 2 (this one being my second) I do not regret getting it.

Build quality is top notch.

Arrival time took a while due to stock replenishing but worth the wait.

Pros: I mean… you can use it the way you want. Be it a glorified mixer, a lofi hip hop making machine, sample mangling, midi sequencer, or a decorative piece in the middle of your living room. It’s the octatrack! If you love it, it will love you back.

Cons: sure sound can be degraded at times, or effects are outdated, or timestretch is blablabla. You can make this machine shine if you really want to.

When playing live under the blasting sun, or in a packed nightclub, the octatrack will do what it does best. It will help you improvise, remangle, and perform in a mechanical and trusted way. Even when everything goes wrong (and it has many times) you will always have the octa as a guardian angel.

10/10 black makes it better.

Elektron products do have a hype and probably the most talked of all is Octatrack. But this particular one is probably worth it. Octatrack is a strange beast - literally a performance sampler. It does have some limitations, i.e. 8 tracks, mediocre effects and a resampling workflow that could be a little bit more straight forward but on the other hand you can produce some unique sounds using it and it's simply ... fun. It does have some learning curve, but this is because it simply has many functions but there is logic in the way it functions - so its more understanding how this thing works than memorizing endless shortcuts (hello Roland MC101). Although I don't tend to use it every-day or for everything probably this is one of the tools I will never going to sell.

When I first turned on the unit I expected (rightly or wrongly) that it would be a similar work flow to the digitakt, syntakt, however I found that it was not that similar, so it was a bit of a brain strain, then it clicked and began to make sense, it can be a digitakt if you want to treat it that way, or a mixer and full on loop sampler etc etc.

It sounds fantastic, the work flow is great when you spend the time on it.

I do recommend watching the cuckoo Octotrack mk1 video it's brilliant and it a great start to understand the mk2 if you have not used either before