I don't often trust when someone tells me "this changes everything", but for me, this does change everything...

For a long time, I've been building my live sets around an MPC or Force + an Octatrack off to the side. I mainly used the Octatrack as a looper and FX but, honestly, didn't go too deep into the sequencer or sampling. In the old version of my OTmkI, it was quirky and dense and very, very rigid. The MPC, granted, was no less quirky, but at least it had a semi-comprehensible manual and an online community of people who were using it that I could fall back on.

Unfortunate, it also had bugs. I was fortunate not to run into to many of these over the years, but a few have reared their ugly heads lately, making it difficult to do my live set the way I want to.

Sometimes I get ideas in the back of my mind just to try something out. For some reason, something was telling me "why haven't you ever used the Octatrack for synth sounds and not just loops? You should try that....sample the Matriarch!).

I need to trust these little voices more, because it was a fucking brilliant one! I sampled a raw, 4 oscillator stack (just one note) and loaded it into a flex machine on the OT and proceeded to play around. This lead to a completely new awaking to the OT and it's potential uses (and me finally figuring out the weirdness of the past). I also (finally) dove into features that were introduced in the last OS update for it, such as trigger conditions, per track scale factors and track trigger modes. Also thanks to a video by Ricky Tinez ( https://www.youtube.com/@RickyTinez ) I finally got my head around parts on the Octatrack and how useful they really are! I will also say that the mkII button layout, while somewhat scoffed at (even by myself) when it was released, make a HUGE different. buttons and knobs have labels now that greatly enhance the experience.

So I took a song that started on the MPC, and I've now moved almost the entire project to the Octatrack. Since I have other tracks on the MPC, this will allow me to switch between the two live...but I'm not even sure I have to? I may finally have one piece of kit that can handle the entire live rig, with a few exceptions (I still want a separate drum machine, a keyboard, a mixer and some sort of master effects/backing track device). I also have a lot more faith in the Octatrack, having never experienced a bug since the early days of its development. It's rock solid, and I would trust it live.

If all this is true, where does that leave the MPC?

That is a good question. As stated above, I have projects on it for my live set that would be difficult to translate over without a lot of work (I most dump samples into the MPC that were recorded at 48khz...the Octatrack plays all samples back at 44.1 so they need to be converted or they will be pitch shifted). The OT also has no capacity for polyphonic samples and has more limited effects, so it is likely the roles will just switch, with the OT taking the lead and the MPC hanging in the background.