octa-swarmatron

Process: Emulating The Swarmatron with an Octatrack

For my fellow electronic music artists here are the details on how I pulled this off with the Octatrack.

I sampled sawtooth wave from the Nord into track 1 of the Octatrack using a Flex machine.
I used the on-board audio editor to normalize the audio; set start, end an loop points to zero crossings; and then cropped the sample.
I used the file menu to save the sample and assign it to the track naming it “Nord01”.
I duplicated this idea on to tracks 2-7 in pointed Flex machines for those tracks to the same source sample.
I went through each track and panned and slight detuned each one.
I configured each track to have slightly different effects. So some had chorus delay. Others had filter and phaser etc… all in the box.
Track 8 is a master track with filter and reverb in Part 1 and in Part 2, comb filter and reverb – so my Swarmatron is 7 voice :^)
I made some scene B variations so the crossfader would either detune or change the playback speed emulating the swarm.
Like a real Swarmatron, I use the track mutes to bring oscillators in and out.
I performed using mostly chromatic trig mode and manually modulated parameters with the crossfader and manually manipulated parameters. I used a little sequencing of some notes with “slide trigs” to emulate playing notes on a ribbon (in addition to manipulating pitch and swarm with crossfader).

All the distortions are intentional (as in I’m not over-driving the inputs). I’m super happy with the non-linearities in this and I think this shows once again that digital can be unstable and organic when you use feedback in effects circuit models in the proper way.