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User Manual: Octopus Navigation

1. 43 Showing track chains Once a track chain has been created you can also easily see how it is spread across the page Simply select a track that is part of a chain and you should see the following information in the selector LED column The track selected one you have your finger on is blinking orange Other track members may be lit green and red In red you can recog nize the head track of the chain in green the other chain members that are not the head If the head and the selected track are the same you will only see a blinking orange LED What about preset chains By now you may wonder what about the preset chain configurations on offer Well they are nothing more that preset chain configurations with shortcut buttons Track base switch You can switch the track base of a chain from using individual track base values to using the track base values of the head track Simply toggle the chain selection indicator between orange and red orange means that tracks are being played in their natural state but in chained order Red means that the tracks will be played taking over the values held in the head track as a base reference Note that this switch will work equally for preset and custom chain configurations Muting chained tracks One more thing to mention about the track base for a chain in the context of muting or un muting tracks that are actually part of a chain If the chain head is the base of
2. 93 orange light reminding you of the index of the position you are just about to edit Press some of the keys in row o and you will see a green blinking light following your presses the green blinking light is showing you the index of the slice that you are just editing When the blinking green and the orange light overlap you will get a blinking orange light Editing trigger sets The area above row o i e rows 1 9 will show none one or more red lights which specify the triggers contained in the selected slice You may select triggers at will by simply toggling them in the Matrix but there can be only one per row the trigger sequence is naturally given by the rows you select them in Therefore a row will only hold one trigger Rows holding no trigger will simply be ignored at runtime But re member if all rows are empty you will get a random trigger to play in that slice before the next slice is called Editing Certainty next While editing you may jump between trigger sets using the key of row o as you like Last thing to mention is the certainty next prob ability This is simply the number shown in the numeric field of the circle in the top left quadrant The number is edited as expected using the top right rotary encoder in addition to the buttons in the numeric quad rant Here some key combinations may be of interest double clicking 5 will produce a 50 clicking simple 100 will produce 100
3. Octopus is conceived as a living instrument with long lasting value to help you search and discover new sonic territory rewarding you with an unequalled haptics experience We invite you to explore the capabilities of Octopus as you like and provide this manual as a startup guide Herein you will recognize many known terms and concepts However others may be used slightly differently from what you would expect and some may be entirely puzzling This is why we recommend that once you are over the first wave of pushing but tons flashing lights and turning knobs you read this guide end to end carefully and we are aware that no one likes to read the manual Taking a step back we do appreciate the complexity that Octopus is able to pro vide Don t get intimidated You will soon discover fast ways of operation to best suit your style and preference the comfort zone where you are most productive But remember that only few clicks away await things that you had never thought of doing or achieving This is what Octopus is about at every stage and no mat ter what you are encouraged to experiment explore and push the boundaries Gabriel Seher and Marcel Achim Stuttgart Germany 2009 Please check our web site regularly for latest news software and documentation http www genoqs net Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer Table of contents I O
4. The display changes to showing some values using the same conven tion you have already encountered in the step mode Some things are new though Let s fly briefly over what we see in the case of the default values for Track 5 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track attributes Track velocity VEL and pitch PIT Velocity and pitch values are displayed in the same manner we have seen in STEP mode The meaning of the values is interesting they represent the base value and are to be seen in the context of the values pertaining to the steps in the particular track Under the hood When playing the values of the steps in that track are added to the base track pitch or velocity As a consequence the baseline for a track is set by the track pitch and velocity Step values are just offsets to this base Octopus uses the convention that middle C MIDI note 60 decimal maps to cs Track LEN and STA factors The Length and Start rows show visually the values for A the length and start factors of a track The STA and LEN EN factors are simply multipliers that are applied to the STA P and LEN offsets of the steps in a track sa ff This means that a high factor value will result in the ef Pul fect of the STA or LEN offsets being amplified while a ros low factor value will result in the effect of the step offsets being diminished or voided altogether In the middle setting of 8 the
5. You may randomize the displayed values using the RND button This will assign random values to all tracks at once for the selected at tribute of course Align Using the ALN function you may re order the tracks in the page sorting them in the page by the values of the selected MIX MAP at tribute The sorting will be done such that the track with the highest value will be placed on the top row Try it out Copy Paste Finally if you have composed a page whose MIX map you would like to replicate you may use the CPY PST functionality to replicate that attribute assignment across the tracks For example assuming you have a page whose pitch structure creates a certain mood or harmony you can apply the same mood to an en tirely unrelated page or pattern by simply copying the PIT map from one page to the other Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode Mix map targets Going back to editing there are three classes of targets attributes ATR preset MIDI CC s any of VOL PAN MOD EXP and MIDI Control Maps MAP 0 5 Some explaining is due here 000000 o0000 Attributes If the ATR type is selected by a double click the SEL buttons will light up green indicating that any of them may be selected The al ready selected attribute will blink orange The matrix will show the value relevant for the respective rows All rotary knobs act upon the same attribute on their respective t
6. s Pg t trey S Cn t Navigation Guide by genoOs Machines Stuttgart Germany 2009 v1 62 www genoqs net WARNING To prevent fire or shock hazard do not expose the device to rain or moisture Important Notice The material in this document is copyright to genoQs Machines and may not be quoted or reproduced in any form without written permission from the company LIMITED SOFTWARE WARRANTY POLICY All the software provided with or purchased especially for genoQs Machines products has been tested for functionality genoQs Machines will make its best efforts to correct reported software defects for future releases subject to technical feasibility genoQs Machines makes no warranty or representation either expressed or implied with respect to the system s performance or fitness for a particular purpose In no event will genoQs Machines be liable for direct or indirect damages arising from any defect in the software or its documentation Further genoQs Machines will not accept any liability for any programs sounds audio recording or sequences stored in or used with genoQs Machines products including the cost of recovery of such data The warranties remedies and disclaimers above are exclusive and take precedence over all others oral or written express or implied to the extent permitted by law in the geographical area of the product s use No employee of genoQs Machines agent distributor or employee of an agent or d
7. Exporting memory content to MIDI Octopus may export content of its memory by the means of MIDI system exclusive SYSEX dumps This is particularly useful when you would like to archive data on a computer or even share memory content across Octopus machines Before you continue please make sure that the sequencer is stopped Connect the MIDI Out 1 port of your Octopus with your receiving device considering that SYSEX data will be export out of the Octo pus port 1 only Export content mode Three types of SYSEX export streams are available PAGE BANK and GRID In order to trigger the export operation SYSEX dump operation you need to be in the EXC mode on the Octopus To enter the EXC mode press and hold GRID while pressing the green blinking EXC ALN button You should see the EXC LED turn orange and blink steadily To exit the EXC mode you may press ESC and return to GRID mode Page exports A PAGE export will output the full contents of a page as MIDI SY SEX stream To trigger a page save while in EXC mode simply press the button of the page that you would like to export Only lit matrix buttons will have an effect basically preventing you from accidentally dumping empty pages Notice that he circle is used as a progression indicator and pages sent have their LED turned from green to orange this is true for all dump types for the duration of the data transfer A single exported page should take on the order
8. Note that upon stopping the sequencer you will also lose any changes made during PLAY mode Navigation Guide 62 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer 63 V Page mode Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode VI Grid mode Grid mode is the level at which you control at large amount of MIDI data at once the Matrix field now gives you instant access to 144 pages 65 Basic operation The GRID mode will typically be the mode used for controlling a large amount of sequence data at once For example sets of active pages can be stored and recalled using the page set snapshot feature together with the function of saving the full instrument state for recall even after a power off or reset cycle Entering Grid mode To enter the GRID mode simply press the green lit GRID button in the MODE selector section MOPE of the front panel 2 GRID Now start the sequencer You should see the note inner circle being filled up with a progress bar Global master clock This progress bar really indicates the position of something you may think of as the global master clock of Octopus This clock runs through a cycle of 16 steps after which it starts over This is the lowest level Octopus clock and the only interaction you have with it is when you change the master tempo Where are you from As a simple reference and reminder as to which page you came from into the GRID you may press the PAGE button in the
9. vated and a red LED means that there is a mute pattern active in the page Finally pressing the main MUT button will toggle all mutators i e all green ones will be turned red and vice versa with the implications already described above Grid live mode As mentioned earlier in the Page operations section the page opera tions you have learned so far were part of the EDIT mode As the name suggests this mode is suited for applications where you work with the material in an editing sense The Grid live mode is more suited in the cases where you are playing your material live hence the name In Grid live mode the matrix but tons will act as toggles for the respective pages This provides more immediate and intuitive handling of material in live situations Switching to Grid live mode is quite easy make sure the EDIT LED is off If it is lit orange default state press it once to turn it off Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools Operating in Grid live mode is easily explained In principle the page buttons now act as page toggles much similar to the way things work in page mode where buttons act as step toggles Confused Pressing a page button that is red page is not playing will turn that page on Pressing the button of a playing page green will turn that page off Bank mute toggles In GRID mode the buttons in the MUT column act as bank mute toggles Pages in muted ban
10. MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics The only difference is in the application of the page PIT offset which is an actual numeric offset as opposed to a factor in the case of veloc ity The pitch value is also bound within the o 127 interval Start The note start value represents the trigger position of the note with respect to the beat bar which would be a o The step start offset is first applied and it is influenced in turn by the STA map factor in the respective track Further the step GRV offset is applied and this one is also influenced by the GRV map factor of the track Finally the track GRV offset is applied to get the final start value of the note Length The default length of a played note is 1 16th The length is influenced by the effector in ways similar to velocity and pitch the effector contributes a length offset to the default be fore the local step length offset is applied The local step length offset is in turn influenced by the track s LEN map factor which is the same and the track s LEN attribute With the length value computed we now have all the information needed to play a note on a sound generator Amount While AMT is not needed to play a note it is mentioned here since it is a key influencer and may be influenced itself by its track AMT map factor Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN X MIDI IN Octopus is capable of both recor
11. rameter which is expressed as a percentage A setting of 100 means that the next slice will be the one following naturally G e slice 3 will be followed by slice 4 etc A setting of 0 will specify that the next slice will be the naturally previous one i e slice 3 will be followed by slice 2 Any value in between will produce the obvious for example a setting of 5096 will mean that there is a 50 50 chance by which the next or the previous slice will be called and then its triggers played Note that the certainty next parameter applies to the switch between slices but does not apply to the trigger set and sequence inside a par ticular slice Example For example let s assume slice 4 has a certainty next of 50 and a trigger set of 2 5 and 8 Once started the slice will first fire up its triggers 2 5 8 and then decide which slice to call next slice 3 pre vious one or slice 5 next one Playing direction maps So now how do you work with all of this The answer is Direction Maps From Track Mode of any track select for that track the di rection you would like to program Make sure to choose a direction between 6 and 16 since directions 1 5 are read only and cannot be modified After choosing the direction double click on the DIR attribute but ton to enter the direction map In this view you will see in row o a Navigation Guide 92 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics
12. trying to reflect to the great est extent possible what you have entered If you are less than satisfied with the results of your play you may clean up the mess by simply clearing the track as we have already seen before Quantization Sometimes you may want to quantize the entered data A quick way to do so is available as well but we would have to jump way ahead of the flow If you really want to know and can t wait just remember for later that all it takes is to clear the STA map of the track in question Or you may want to set the STA attribute map factor to the lowest possible value where it will not have any effect on played output and therefore play everything on the beat 23 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps The MODE block Let s talk a bit about the buttons surrounding the STEP button you have just used in the MODE block There are other buttons in here as well most of which denote Ob jects Their use goes back to the object model hierarchy discussed in the introduction Mode block explained Generally the MODE block is used to offer both navigation functionality and orientation GRID MODE For example upon power on you will see that Oc on topus is in PAGE mode indicated by the blinking O PAGE LED and that you have an option to NEZ switch up into the GRID mode lit green o o Navigation Here in PAGE mode you may select a track
13. Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Col Each bank can be activated for current play by selecting one of its non empty pages This means that up to 9 pages may be played con currently For an overview please take a look at the diagram MIDI data output Depending on the number of concurrently active tracks and the den sity of the produced MIDI data it is possible to overload the MIDI stream A more complete discussion of various system and MIDI loading is found in the section on System Load Handling 5 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance Pages One can think of Octopus pages as track containers The number of tracks in a page is 1o with a default length of 16 steps each Musical structures longer than 16 steps are built by chaining tracks in a page such that chained tracks are played consecutively Musical structures shorter than 16 steps can be built by using skipped steps in tracks for example More on this later The preset chain modes available are ro tracks of 1 row each default 5 tracks of 2 rows each 2 tracks of 4 rows each a track of 2 rows e 1 track made up of 8 rows a track of 2 rows However the user is also free to build any other track chain configu ration as desired This combined with the ability to play up to 9 pages concurrently and each of the 9 pages being part of a cluster of at most 16 consecu tive pages gives you a lot of room for
14. LEDs are lit up and some aren t Each lit button represents something we call an attribute map for the track There are attribute maps for the following attributes VEL PIT LEN STA AMT GRV and MCC What is an attribute map Glad you asked Simply put an attribute map is a view of a particular step attribute for the entire track Confusing Let s look at an example the VEL map would be the view that shows you the velocity offset of all steps of a track at once This is true with one exception that is the DIR line In the case of DIR we do not have a map per se but rather the capability to edit the direction configuration for the sequencer The details are ex plained in the chapter dealing with directions and we will disregard it in this section Example Press VEL and you will notice that keeping it pressed will make it blink orange and the mutator column will make CLR RND and ZOM available Briefly CLR and RND will affect the track VEL map and either clear it to default value or pick a random value Now the interesting one Showing attribute maps With the VEL selector still pressed press the ZOM mutator to get to the MAP mode What you now see is the VEL map of the track you are working on You can also enter MAP mode by double clicking the attribute but ton VEL in this example Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics Working with attribute maps The matrix displa
15. MODE block and you should see a orange blinking light at the respective position Note that this shows something you can think of as the page in fo cus which changes however as soon as you start operating on pages from the GRID mode as we shall see described in this chapter Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode Page operations In GRID mode you are looking at all your pages at a glance every button in rows 1 9 represents a page and the LEDs indicate the status of the pages A notion we introduced earlier is that of banks a bank is the set of pages which exist in the same Grid row and who may play in a mutu ally exclusive way i e at most one page per bank will play at any given time Matrix representation OFF means the page is empty green means the page has some con tent and is playing red means the page does have some content and is not playing Later on you will get into the situation where page LEDs may turn orange indicating that the page is queued up for play Grid EDIT and live modes Furthermore you should take quick notice of the EDIT LED It should light orange to indicate that we are currently operating in Grid EDIT mode By the end of this chapter we will have seen the Grid live mode as well Let s stay focused on what we have for a moment Zooming into pages You will see that the ESC LED is lit up in GRID mode This may be a quick way to return to the page you
16. and double clicking 100 will produce a o For the rest it is left as an exercise to the reader to look at how the five default directions are programmed in order to get the final clari fication or confirmation on having understood how the Octopus di rection model works Please also refer to the dedicated tutorial in the back section of this manual or available as a separate document on our web site Remarks The direction map is no different to the other maps we have seen so far press ESC at any time to return to the page mode but be aware that any change you make to the direction will be permanent like any Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics other change on the Octopus However unlike with regular MIDI data there is no PLAY capability for the directions You may however use CLR to restore the default directions in the slots 1 5 and the forward direction in the other slots In fact remem ber that directions 1 5 are read only and not editable Finally when you need an inspiration boost go into a direction map and start using RND That one may get you going Navigation Guide 94 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics 95 Track attribute maps Now that we have looked in some detail at the mutators while in TRACK mode you may wonder what is going on to the left of the matrix in the selector column The selector column You see that some of the
17. and you should see the current size of the event interval for the selected attribute displayed numerically in the numeric field of the outer circle Use the main rotary to adjust it to your desire What you should notice is that the changes produced by the events will be bound between the base value of the track for that attribute and the sum of the base and the interval size Event execution Another detail that may be of interest is that events will always exe cute exactly on the beat and not be influenced by the step s STA value to be pulled or pushed against the time line Clearing events Events may be cleared from a track by zooming into the step and pressing the flashing SEL attribute button so it is solid orange or green again AMT events You may have noticed that while the AMT value of a step determines the effect an event has on its respective attribute the AMT map fac tor may be modified by events as well By creating AMT events you are effectively able to have dynamic changes in the actual amount of change that is being applied to an attribute map factor so we will be seeing changes to the change rate This is a powerful instrument to create evolving and to a large degree unpredictable sequences Step event offset reset Finally a step AMT of o ero will discard the offset that was pro duced by a step event Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics The Effector One mutato
18. both composition and live play PAGE Mode a O O Oc Oo O Oe O Oo Oo Oo 1 Q Oc Oc Oc Oo Oc Oo Oo Oo O E 0 Qo Oc Oc Oc Oo Oc Oo Oc Oo Oo 3 1 Qe Oo Oc Oo O Oc Oe Oc Oo O 2 Qo Oc Oc Oo Cc Oo Oo O Oo Oo 98 3 O Oc Oo Oe Oc O Oe Oo Oo 4 Qo Qo Oc O Co O O Oc O O 5 Qo Oc Oc Om Ce Co Oc O Om O TRACK 9 TRACK 8 TRACK 7 TRACK 6 STEP 16 of TRACK 5 o Qo Qo o Q TRACK 5 TRACK 4 TRACK 3 TRACK 2 TRACK 1 O Oc Oc Ge Oe Oe Oc O Oe Oo O O Oe O Oc Oo Oe Oe Oc O O Oc Oe Oc Oe Oe Oc Oe Oe Oo N O Oc Ge Oe Oc Oc Oe Ge O Oc 4 Oc Oc Oe Oo Oe Oe Oc Oo O Oo E Oc O Ge Oe O Oe O O Oc O 8 O O O Oc Oe Oe Oe Oe Oe Oe TRACK O 6 Qo Qo Oc Oo Q STEP 1 STEP 2 STEP 3 STEP 4 STEP 5 STEP 6 STEP 7 STEP 8 STEP 9 STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP STEP Navigation Guide 6 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance Tracks If pages are Octopus track containers then tracks are the step con tainers Apart from other attributes each track has a locator associ ated with it which can be controlled independently from locators of other tracks Steps In Octopus steps are the smallest meaningful entities for example notes in a musical context In track mode the individual steps of a se lected track can be modified across their available range of attributes Mutators Entities or attributes of entities can be op
19. ception that no MIDI data is transmitted when you operate on the matrix This is particularly interesting for the Berlin School type of performances By default in PAGE mode the EDIT LED button lights scc green Click on it once to toggle it to blinking orange and once more to make it blink green Em Again when the EDIT LED lights steady green everything behaves as you know it the step buttons toggle the step states When EDIT blinks orange you are in EDIT mode and when EDIT blinks green you are in EDIT PERFORM mode Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode Editor ATR state In Page mode an ATR may be temporarily assigned to the EDIT knob group Engage This is done by holding the selector of the respective attrib mcc ute to select the attribute and at the same time pressing the EDIT master button to make the actual assignment The indicator for the Knob group will light orange indicating EDIT activity In this mode the EDIT knobs will behave just like another group of MIX knobs for the just selected attribute Disengage Pressing the EDIT master button once will cancel the assignment and return to the legacy mode of operation Navigation Guide 58 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode 59 Editor MCC state The EDIT button has one more state that is the MCC send state This is used to make the editor knobs send MCC data Sending MCC data The MCC amounts sent w
20. indicate the current values for the step attributes Finding your position To see which step is being edited hold the STEP object button down You will see exactly one blinking matrix LED in red or in green This blinking LED shows the step you have zoomed into If it is red it means it is not toggled on if it is green it is toggled on Gaining control You may use the TGL key to toggle its status as you like As you toggle the step status you see that another LED changes color as well the LED in row o is on when the step is turned on and off otherwise The reason is that row o is showing the pattern of the track to which the zoomed step belongs Moving on Holding the Step Mode button and pressing any key in the matrix se lects the corresponding step into the zoom focus and adapts the dis play of the POS row according to the track s contents Alternatively if you want to edit a step in the same track you may press its corresponding button in row o the MCH row to switch view to that particular step This is an easy and fast way to jump from Step to Step directly with out ever leaving the Step mode Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode Step attributes Going over the front panel from left to right you see all LEDs lit up in the SEL column We shall explain in a second what this is about Step velocity VEL The contents of the VEL row may look familiar a number is represen
21. its EFF muta tor to red by double clicking on the EFF button You should now hear that the step in column 1 of the listening track is now played differently with the PIT offset from the Feeder track applied to it The popular thing to do now is to start changing the track lengths for feeder and listener to get long running modulation results Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics Editing step phrases Enter The Phrase Editor To enter the phrase editor double click a step and then double click the GRV button in the SEL column The phrase editor mode is easily recognized since all of the 7 chord note LEDs on the right are lit Equally you may access the phrase editor by entering track mode double click one of the track selectors and then double click the GRV button on the SEL column The bottom row Row o The bottom row of the matrix row o shows the index number of the phrase currently being edited by a blinking LED of the correspond ing color If you see nothing shown there you re looking at phrase o the default setting for a step and which has no effect i e plays the step as is Turn the main or GRV rotary to change phrases and switch the view accordingly The 7 green note LEDs are mostly there to tell you that they may be pressed to set the optional phrase polyphony press one of the note buttons to make it blink orange To restore the phrase to normal full polypho
22. just as we 9 have seen in this chapter and you will notice that the TRACK LED turns green indicating that you may go into TRACK mode Indeed pressing the TRACK button will take you there Similarly as soon as you select a step in a page using the SEL button you will see that the STEP mode may be entered as the STEP LED is lit green Orientation At any time during operation you will see a orange LED blink indi cating the mode that you are currently in This is a key navigational landmark always telling you where you are One slight exception to that rule is the PAGE mode A red light of the PAGE LED indicates that you are in PAGE mode however that page is currently not playing in the grid A green light in the PAGE LED indicates that the page is solo ed in the grid A red light in the PLAY LED is showing that PLAY mode is not active this will be discussed later Navigation Guide 24 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode III Step mode Step mode is the level at which you can inspect and tweak directly step pa rameters the Matrix field is dedicated to information about just one step 25 Basic operation Zooming in Double click a step You will see the display in the MODE field switch to STEP mode shown by the blinking STEP mode LED It is helpful to think of this as a zoom into the step you double clicked on Some explanation is needed for what you now see being displayed The various rows
23. just by experimenting with the GRV knob Note that if POS doesn t understand the timing of the current phrase it uses a simple factor two multiply or division for the new groove POS uses the STA offset of the first non zero phrase note to analyze the timing GRV The GRV knob like the main knob selects another phrase from the pool for editing Save Your Work The phrase pool is saved as part of the global Grid object along with other global data The grid object is saved when the full machine state is saved To save the full machine state do this 1 Go to GRID mode 2 Stop the machine Press GRID Program 4 Wait for the progress lights to complete the circle Note that the saved Grid data will survive OS updates from OS ver sion v1 6x and newer Navigation Guide IO octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics 109 Hypersteps Let s start with a short background to help explain the idea of hyper steps Normally steps trigger notes in the following sense they pro vide the start the velocity and the length playtime of the played note Now imagine that the played note is not only a note but rather a note sequence And imagine the step is now providing the start ve locity and playtime of the note sequence such that the note sequence always plays to its end always time adjusted to the given playtime The final bit of the picture here is that our presumed note sequence may be a
24. just came from assuming it is still the page in focus i e the last page that was operated on from the grid mode or the one we have just zoomed out of In order to get back into a page any page you would either double click on the button corresponding to a page or simply select the page by holding down the PAGE mode button and then pressing the page Alternatively you may also press the ZOM button while pressing the page button What you finally choose is really up to your personal style and workflow Page considerations By telling you how to leave the GRID mode we have already given away a lot about how to work with pages in the GRID hopefully just Navigation Guide 66 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode 67 as you would expect The key principle here is to grab and operate but this should be no surprise this far After zooming into the page as indicated above you enter Page mode If the PAGE mode LED is flashing red the selected page is not active i e it is not playing in the Grid To make it play hold the PAGE button and press TGL to make it active Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode Page clusters So far we have only played pages one by one There is a way to make pages play consecutively this allows you to create structures longer than one page alone has to offer Building clusters In order to play two or more pages consecutively they have to be situated
25. next to each other in the GRID You can achieve this easily by using CPY PST CLR mutator functions in order to create what we shall call page clusters A page cluster is therefore a group of two or more adjacent pages sur rounded by either empty pages or grid margins Cluster activation Create a page cluster consisting of three pages in a row of your choice Once the cluster is built make sure the sequencer is playing and toggle one of the pages in the cluster to green i e make it play The page will keep on playing Activate cluster play for the row in which the cluster exists by press ing the SEL button of that row once toggling it from red to green When green you will notice that once the currently playing page is finished playing the next page in the cluster starts to play and so forth Clustering side notes In total you may set up to 16 pages for consecutive play maximum size of a cluster Assuming that all pages have all their tracks chained up 10 tracks per page this means we get a total of 160 x 16 2560 steps playing con secutively Add to that the capability of allowing any page to be repeated up to 16 times let s look at that next Navigation Guide 68 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode 69 Page play parameters Page repeats STA Page clustering can become even more fun as 1 2 you can set the number of repetitions individu 5 Or O ally for each page For example pag
26. of 10 KB Page imports When played back to the Octopus a previously exported page will be reloaded into its original and natural location in the grid i e the posi tion it was in at the time of its export This means also that it will overwrite any content in that location Navigation Guide 134 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools 135 Note that playback of SYSEX content to the Octopus may occur at any time including while the sequencer is running Once the page is received the machine will switch to GRID mode and the page data is pasted from the incoming SYSEX buffer into the page memory This operation is equivalent to a page copy Bank exports A bank export will export all non empty pages in a bank and behaves very similarly to exporting page content basically chaining several page export operations To trigger a bank export simply press the button of the bank you would like to export in the SEL column The duration of a bank export is dependent on the number of pages that will be exported but as an indicator the size of a full bank is on the order of 160KB Here as well the circle acts as an indicator to show progression of the transmission Grid exports The GRID export is covering all the data that is not page related but has an influence on the overall machine behavior This includes pa rameters like strum levels for example To initiate a grid export simply press the green lit MIX
27. of the GRID Mode The GRID TRACK mode provides most of the GRID functionality described above allowing a different view on your MIDI data Here matrix buttons represent tracks as opposed to pages and have the functionality of track selectors as described for the PAGE Mode We may refer to them as virtual track selectors Entering the Grid Track mode To enter the GRID TRACK mode enter the GRID mode first by pressing GRID and then press the green lit TRACK button The TRACK button will blink orange and the GRID button will stay lit in orange This indicates that you are in the GRID TRACK mode Virtual track selectors The Matrix will slightly change its contents and some explanation is necessary to what it now conveys For each page playing in the GRID you will see a lit bar of 10 LEDs from position 4 to position 15 leaving three blank columns of buttons on each side Each lit button acts as virtual track selectors and the LEDs indicate the toggle state of the corresponding track Hands on As an example let s assume there is only one page playing in the GRID in bank 1 of the grid and no tracks are muted in that page You should see a bar of 10 green LEDs in row 1 positioned in the centre of the row G unlit LED s to each side of the 10 LED bar Working with tracks Moving from here is easy press and hold any of the virtual track se lectors and you will see that two mutator functions become available TGL and S
28. of the steps you are viewing The value is displayed in the numeric quadrant of the circle and is always shown as a sum of the track and step value for that particular attribute Also note that while the meaning of the large circle value is changing the pitch circle is always dedicated to showing the pitch This is just a quick but very powerful way of entering data for the steps of a particular track Navigation Guide 96 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics 97 Values may also be entered using the keys of the circle fields I e en tering a velocity value for a step is similar to entering a tempo value You will see the new value reflected in the matrix display Reading the pitch display The way to read the display is the following the red dots will indicate the octave and the green dot will indicate the note in that octave For example three red dots starting at C and a green dot at G mean the pitch is G in octave 3 Exception two red dots starting at C and a orange dot at D mean that the pitch is D in octave 3 Entering pitches Entering pitches is done by pressing the appropriate note In order to transpose octaves use the left and right keys labeled C Finding your way around the maps The selector column allows you to jump directly between the avail able track maps The mutator column allows you to use some func tions on the map CLR will restore default values RND will choose rando
29. offset for this new step PIT encoder and maybe even a different time compression Repeat the procedure as you see fit Within a few clicks you may end up with a fairly complex structure which you probably wouldn t have come up with that quickly other wise Enjoy Navigation Guide 86 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VIII Musical tools 87 Musical scales Each page can be associated with a particular musical scale Once that association is done and a scale is active all page notes are forced to play in the chosen scale Force to scale Force to scale for a page is enabled by going to PAGE it mode and simply pressing the green lit SCALE SEL R os o button Coming from the default state you will see o its LED turn red and all scale notes light up with the exception of upper C Conversely force to scale is disabled by pressing the red SCALE SEL button which indicates that force to scale is engaged So in general the red LED of SCALE SEL is indicating that the page pitches are forced into the scale a green LED indicates that the page is playing the pitches as they are The lower C LED is also lit orange What you see here is that all notes are selected in the scale and that C is the base tone of this scale Let s now modify the scale to get more interesting effects Composing scales While having force to scale active as de scribed above press the Select button Gn o9 9 o the outer circ
30. on a step to zoom into it and select one of the attributes in the SEL column As discussed earlier initially these are all lit waiting to be selected Once selected as an event they will blink You will notice that some are colored orange some green The orange attributes indicate that their events will influence the attribute map factor while the events for the green ones will change the attribute value directly Set event values The amount AMT value of the step determines the change in the track attribute every time the step is played In the case where the set amount is larger than the possible value range of the target a modulo operation will be carried out to bring it into the range Note that the changes can be positive or negative ac cording to the amount value Random event values A non zero value of the GRV attribute for the step generating an event will result in a random value between o and the value set in the amount AMT attribute Event range settings Sometimes it makes sense to limit the range in which the event change occurs to a value below the size of its natural range Those Navigation Guide IOC octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics IOI values are 17 for each of the attribute map factors 16 for DIR and POS and 32 for MCH To change the size of the interval used by events proceed as follows go into STEP mode i e zoom into your respective step Activate an event
31. sent out of both MIDI ports When Octopus acts as MIDI clock slave MIDI clock will be re ceived on a single port The MIDI port that receives MIDI Clock will be automatically detected and requires no explicit selection by the user The MIDI Clock state is remembered as part of the machine state when the machine state is saved See the Instrument State Save sec tion on saving the Octopus state Master An unlit clock indicator LED means that Octopus is not sending and not receiving MIDI clock information Pressing the clock selector turns it orange indicating that Octopus is sending MIDI Clock as well as associated transport commands out both MIDI ports Another press toggles it back to off default mode Slave A double click turns it green or red more on that below meaning that Octopus is now listening to the MIDI clock and that is is acting as a MIDI slave Change of clock selection switching between master and slave mode is possible only in GRID and PAGE mode MIDI Clock echo in slave mode MIDI clock that is received while the machine is in MIDI slave mode can be sent out to the MIDI out so other devices can be slaved along the same chain When switching to slave mode using the 200 key the default color of the 200LED is green Pressing it once toggles it to red with a red set ting meaning that the clock information is passed through Navigation Guide 128 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Gener
32. steps will get stacked to form a chord on the respective step in the destination track Note that if source track steps contain chords already only their base pitch will be considered for FLT The additional chord data in the source tracks will be ignored The base pitch of the resulting chord will be the lowest pitch encoun tered in the respective column with the other found pitches being stacked on top Another detail worth mentioning is the influence of FLT on the VEL LEN and STA values of the steps in the destination track FLT always carries over the VEL LEN and STA attributes of the last encoun tered active step for a particular column position inside the destina tion track Also something to realize is that FLT is MIDI channel agnostic you may FLT different tracks playing on different channels but the result will always play on the MIDI channel of the destination track With that in mind let us suggest two best practice usage methods for FLT Firstly before you are applying FLT to your track selection make sure the target track is muted This way you do not get any double notes playing if the target track is set to the same MIDI channel as any source tracks You then can do a smooth blend in of the new material which may be useful when play ing live for example Secondly you may want to make sure the target track MIDI channel is different from any of the source tracks before you apply FLT This will effect the o
33. takes to do that Now use the copy and paste functionality to get the original pattern on row 9 and the altered pattern on row 8 Clear everything else How to do that Grab the track to be cleared and press the CLR mu tator and the track will clear Alternatively just for this exercise you may simply mute it too Use whatever method you prefer So now you should only have two non empty tracks with no other steps set in the page For now take a look at the section of the front panel we refer to as the chain selector You will see that the bottom LED is lit orange all others are off Chain mode selection Press now the button labeled XXX The corresponding LED will light orange indicating that this chain mode is selected If the sequencer is already running you notice immediately what this means if the sequencer is not running you may want to start it now Preset chain modes Basically in this new chain mode you now have pairs of tracks playing sequentially In our example you will now first hear Track 9 play then Track 8 The other tracks will follow this pattern Try the other chain options as well sets of four tracks being played XXXD and one long chain of eight tracks being played XX XID for a total of 128 steps in your current page User defined chaining Finally you may create any chained track configuration that you like For example you can chain the top 4 tracks to build a structure of a total of 64
34. the MIDI Channel assignment MCH will re ZON main unchanged 0000 5 3 The pitch is set to the default value of 60 Note that the factory pitch assignment can be recalled by calling the CLR mutator upon a PAGE If you are at the PAGE level and grab a Track and clear it everything is reset A E Track randomize RND PST This will create a random step pattern in the track not affecting the other parameters in the track RCL CLR Track FLAT FLT Q The FLT function is used mainly to combine the pitch content of several tracks into just one track in the same MUT Navigation Guide 38 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode 39 page This function was conceived as a creative tool and not as a track space saving feature as it may appear at first sight In some instances it may be useful as such but just in some Please keep this in mind FLT will only become available when you have selected two or more tracks in a page There is a notion of a destination track which is al ways the one from the selection with the lowest index Applying FLT to the track selection will fill che destination track with content from the source tracks For every active step in any of the source tracks you will get the cor responding step activated in the target track Skipped steps will sim ply be ignored If more than one step is active in the same column across the selected tracks the lowest 7 pitches of active
35. the available multipliers and the key press combinations needed to get to them Multiplier Hold Click Double click Navigation Guide 46 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode 47 The values selected for a track are indicated as follows In general red dots denote multipliers and green dots denote divisors of the cardi nality For example having the LEDs of and lit green at the same time de notes a divisor of 5 meaning a track multiplier of 1 5 Exceptions to the rule include the 1 5 1 1 5 8 1 8 16 and 1 16 multi pliers covered below The 1 5 multiplier is as it may be obvious already essential for easy triplet creation a triplet being three notes played instead of two It is shown as a orange 2 and a red 1 Its inverse the 1 1 5 multiplier is shown as a orange 2 and a green I The 8 multiplier is shown as a orange 4 and a red 2 LED 1 8 is shown as a orange 4 and a green 2 The 16 multiplier is shown as orange 4 and 2 plus a red 1 and 1 16 is indicated as a orange 4 and 2 and a green one Please note that during play switching the clock multiplier is effective immediately with no quantization with regard to the master tempo Realignment of the tracks may always be done by using the ALN functionality available Note that when the sequencer is playing the changes of the track clock multiplier are effective on the next 1 16th beat of the master clock and not immediately This provides better
36. track alignment and improves the general feel of the sequence without the need to explicitly align after a track clock switch Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track auxiliaries Track chase light If you are in Track mode while the sequencer is playing you will no tice a chase light in the row belonging to the track that you are edit ing This is just to help your orientation Track view switch Let s assume you have now edited a track s parameters and now would like to adapt another track s parameters to some change you have made One way is to use ESC or PAGE to exit the track mode and zoom into the new track as you have seen it before A much quicker way is to click in any direction the MIX knob corre sponding to the new track in our example track 6 The display will instantly switch to showing parameters of track 6 This function is particularly useful when you are dealing with chained tracks where some change in a track may directly imply that the next track in chain will have to change as well Track follow There is also an automated way of switching the track in the view that is the FOLLOW mode T d When Follow is active and you are zoomed into a track that is part of a chain the view will always follow the chaselightin X the respective track chain in the sense that it will always show the track that is currently played by the chase light Activate Follow by pressi
37. track at once This can be done easily using the same method you have already seen in the STEP chapter Creating track selections Make sure you are in PAGE mode Hold down SEL and then press the selectors of the tracks you would like to add to your selection The track selection you have just created will stay active for EDIT operations until you press the SEL button again Also while the selection is active you may toggle tracks into and out of the selection Track selection recall With a track selection active once you press the SEL button the se lection will be de activated and the SEL button turns red indicating that there is a selection that may be recalled Generally SEL will store the last track selection you have made Pressing SEL again will bring back your previous selection Shortcuts There is also a quick way to select all tracks in a page at once simply double click on the SEL key you will see the full column of SEL LEDs light up Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track chaining Track chains explained A track chain is simply a defined sequence of playing tracks from a page in a given consecutive order Track chains are always configured in PAGE mode and are useful in creating structures longer than 16 steps per page Playing considerations Chain configurations may or may not influence the set track parame ters Each track can be played as it is or e
38. track which is controlled by a step in the manner described We call such a step a hyper step In short hypersteps are steps that do not trigger notes but trigger tracks in their respective page Therefore if a track is linked to a hyperstep once the hyperstep is played the track is being triggered to play at a speed corresponding to the step absolute length in 1 192 and taking over the hyperstep s velocity and pitch offset Engaging hypersteps To use hypersteps go to PAGE mode hold a track selector down and at the same time designate the hyperstep in the matrix in a row other than the track s by pressing it down as well You will see that both the track selector and the hyperstep start shining green A track can only have one associated hyperstep Destroying hypersteps To disengage or destroy the hyperstep of a hyped track hold the re spective track selector pressed and then press a step button in the matrix row of the track The association between the step and the track will be removed Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics Note attribute computation In the following we would like to summarize the mechanism of note attribute computation The model is depicted by the diagram below Some explanation is necessary here on how to read the picture DEFAULT TRACK VEL FEEDER VEL MAP factor FEEDER STEP VEL offset factorized EFF pool VEL offset VEL VEL MAP factor
39. would like to jump to This works in MAP mode as well In Step mode press and hold STEP and press a grid button to jump to the step corresponding to the pressed button 4 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance Grid Octopus provides a total of 144 pages grouped in 9 banks of 16 pages each making up the GRID Visually a bank corresponds to one row of the matrix hence a page corresponds to one button of the matrix This accounts for 9 rows row 1 9 with row o serving as a grid set selector GRID Mode B ums Qo Oc Oo Oo Oo Oc Oo Oo Oo O n Row8 Row8 Row 7 Page 5 16 66666066060606660 6666666660666660 6666666666666666 6666666660666666 6666666666666666 6666666660606666 6666666666666666 6666666666666666 6666666666666666 66666660006000 Row6 o Qo Oo Co o Row 5 Row 4 Row 2 Row 1 e e O Oe Oe O Oe Oc O Oe Oc O0 0 Qo Oc Oc Oc Oc Oc Oo Oc Oo Oo 3 109 Qo Qo Oo Oc Oo O Oc Oo Q 2 Oo Oc Oc O Cc O Oc Oo Oo O A Row 0 3 Oo O Oo Co Co Co Oo Oo OQ Oct 4 Qo Qo Oc O O O O Oc O Q 5 Qo Oc Oc Oc Cc Cc Oc Cc Cm O um3 Qo Oc Oc Oc Oc Oc Oo Oc Oo Oo fA 6 Qo Qo Oc Oo Oo um4 Qo Ov Oc Oo O Oo Oo Oc Oo O un2 Qo Oc Oo Oo Oc Oc Oo Oo Oo Oo ums Qo o Oo Oo Oo Oc Oo Oo O Ovo E ume Qo Qo Qo Oo O O Oo Oc O O um Qo Qo Qo Oo Oo Oo Oc Oo Oo Oo Col Col Col Col Col Col
40. 29 BUBD SEIBEELOIS ades d em TNC vee udo Uia dini apu Deu ERU EDU Sony E EEEE Tn 31 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode 33 Basic operatio mecrea iieiea ie secado dudar ORE D ease doe sunk e 33 Track attributes TI Um asian tuavelun Mata 34 Track GUE AE OTS Uu AA Deoa ath aai ui Sa RA AAs Ale oath dn Malet alae dua 38 Track selections ann doo et NA DADA ood ata MR a dU AN 4I Track chaining ienna te tvi lcu EEE a tub lov a Qd ug 42 Track program changes delati slesie quita Cice epiac n uten ioa ann etin Gen viai 44 Track tempo multtpliefssos5no doti ente GR EMI UN aus 46 deack aut Idtm emotiva fees RCTS A Aa rca rideo ie 48 V Page mode 51 Basic operatio caius tasted ica deti on Syn b Ec esie 51 Te Ner Dlockinimineeiaerini a ala RON db aai usen ca deca a TER Nf 52 Working with M D ADS adn dose eter rd RU Uu DUM nod FT eH P dp RI SUR add 53 Mix map CATE CUS icseeexdet er ere DAD eiu spas hie E d ates 54 BD TO SCG ao tte eene Deseo baie nodes EUM abt Dc ra t ua sh E 56 EDIF PER ORM 5tqUe euet e I dtt HD REM CI PERENNI use 57 Editor MGG SCREB Lo o reee ain dedi eidu iQ M veiba d A cdit ars 59 Page mu tator Fu CLIO US oe Minion deserti db dvi d oiar ee dune tni rA se dena 60 Dank NCW estates etic Rates eRe act a coe ecu ue ean ve Daten ade then ch 61 Play GI OS m 62 VI Grid mode 65 DasiccoOpera EL ON ites eal cre itv psn ie eel ida EAEE A Snives E eto dd 65 Pase Op tati nS sis dotem batte tubaS co ot EEE ette
41. At any time during play in GRID mode you may zoom into any page you would like by the methods described already If the page is part of a cluster and some page in the cluster other than the zoomed one is playing you may want to see the position of the chase light in the cluster Press the green Follow key to enable the follow page func tion turning it red You will notice that the matrix display O will always switch to the page that is currently playing essen tially following the chase light as it moves forward through the pages of the current bank This is particularly useful when you are working on structures longer than one page Pressing the Follow button again will freeze the view on the page currently showing An easy way to remember the color coding could be Red stick to the red chase light green stick to the green steps Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode Navigation Guide 72 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools VII Performance tools This section presents some tools that are especially useful in performance situations allowing for unmatched freedom in your workflow 73 Working with pages This section is assuming we are working in the GRID mode where we have control over the behavior of individual pages Please switch to GRID mode if you are not there already The Matrix field keys in rows 1 9 represent pages At any given time only one pag
42. CC row and is indicating that the track will be sending MIDI pitch bend messages according to the MCC values stored in that track s steps The CHANNEL PRESSURE flag is indicated by two red dots in the positions 15 and 16 of the MCC row and is telling us that the track Navigation Guide 36 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode 37 will be sending CHANNEL PRESSURE messages according to the MCC values stored in that track s steps If a track has an MCC parameter value other than none i e the 4 green LEDs in the positions 13 16 its chase light color in the matrix will be orange while the tracks whose MCC values are set to none have a red chase light Track MIDI channel MCH The MCH row indicates the MIDI channel for this track Default value for all tracks is channel 1 on port 1 This is represented by a green light in the 1 position Now turn the MCH rotary encoder slowly to the right until you reach 16 Turning it once more to the right will light the LED in posi tion 1 red This means that channel 1 on port 2 is now selected Therefore green 1 16 assigns a track to MIDI port 1 red 1 16 to MIDI port 2 While you are choosing the right MIDI channel for your track be sure that the numeric representation is a solid green or red and not a blinking one Blinking representations are related to virtual MIDI channels covered in a separate section Track data direct entry Most of the parameter values in the
43. Ed uen 66 Ip scii T riots i E AE A RE ORE 68 Pave play parameters uae ou achicha Od AE RN Ru uus 69 Page follo ata reci EA ad AAAA EATR t E NS 71 VII Performance tools 73 Working with DASS o erac te do nude ee odo e a sarai 73 Working with step SELECTIONS eco e e Ie A oa e eb eiegkue 77 MIDI Control NDS ica odi a itid E qa daa hag as Hte TA 78 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer Page Sebscmacunedte usati a NU MN Uii tutu GoidsIrack modeste e te darian f teen te VIII Musical tools St pp CHOT dS Mp TETNUT Chord ground rules Playing chords Step polyphony Random note picks from chord pool Step phrase Sosi iot d todo tiu ed ota baie da ini IX Advanced topics Track diteetioDcedILil B oues osito M uu eed A general view on directions Playing direction maps JArack attribite IAD 8 ile ite iere sa ase Meenas Working with attribute maps Map factors Step SVE NUS citer poa eoe ba aps E dU ADU ET o RU ESUEG d he BIIeCUDES ene voa dd eec ctrca Delain tee pa tutes The EFF mechanism Playing the Effector Editing step phrases sciinte FLY PETSCE DS e aaien Ra iaia Note attribute computatione o datnr eios a eas X MIDI IN Note stream recording icuscetedecici i bnteiedisisec niin ebd eben a Step note JE COOL qi gae en di Un p iE Advanced X eeopndingeudondar et aei d tus bua MIDI Control Map learning tee teta ride edad eina External dorce to sealezadisei ipta nito cierta Exteraal scale editing sic set
44. ID Another function available is jumping to another page of the grid As you press the PAGE key you will notice a orange LED blink in the Matrix This indicates the position of the current page in the grid Switching pages Holding PAGE pressed and pressing a matrix key other than the one blinking and in any row other than row o will take you directly to the page associated with that key in the grid This is especially useful when you are working on musical structures spanning several pages Navigation Guide 60 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode 61 Bank view When in PAGE mode by default you see a green lit Select LED in the top right quadrant of the circle along with the orange Tempo LED They indicate the two available modes for the main knob and the numeric field one of them default one is to show master tempo in the numeric filed of the circle the other one is what we call the bank view A bank is the set of 16 pages that live on the same Grid row and which are mutually exclusive at playtime meaning that only one page may play per bank at any time Entering bank view Pressing Select will allow you to see in the numeric field the banks that are currently playing i e contain a playing page as green lit but tons The orange blinking one is the bank currently in your matrix editor Note that this says nothing about which column in the bank is cur rently playing as a bank only says somethi
45. Melittastr 1 70597 Stuttgart Germany http www genoqs net info genogs net 137 Navigation Guide
46. OL Also the EDIT block indicator blinks orange as you may use the en coders to modify the track selected via the virtual selectors This should come pretty naturally or so we think Navigation Guide 80 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools 81 When exactly one track is selected in GRID TRACK mode the pitch of that track becomes visible and editable in the inner circle just as we have seen it in PAGE mode Quick track toggle Sometimes all you want to do in GRID TRACK mode is to toggle tracks on the fly There is a quick way to do that by holding any but ton that belongs to columns 1 3 or 14 16 while pressing a virtual track selector The virtual track selector now directly toggles the mute status of the respective track Zooming into tracks You may do much lowerlevel editing of tracks simply by double clicking a virtual selector to enter TRACK mode for that track i e zooming into that track And you know your way around there al ready To return from TRACK mode to GRID TRACK mode simply press the GRID and TRACK mode buttons at the same time this proved to work well Grid Track live mode The GRID TRACK live mode is much similar to the live mode in Grid mode It is activated by pressing the EDIT button LED such that it is lit green When in live mode the matrix buttons will act as toggles for the re spective tracks This provides more immediate and intuitive handling of material in li
47. PIT offset 0 LEN 1 16 STA offset O AMT E MCC none Step randomize RND This will assign most step attributes random values The randomiza tion takes place based on the actual Step value and using 50 as ran domization amount The GRV and POS attributes that are not af fected by this function Step zoom ZOM In STEP mode the LED is lit up in red Pressing the ZOM key will exit the STEP mode and return you back into the PAGE mode Step copy and paste CPY PST A selected step may be copied using the CPY mutator To paste it to a different position you may select the step at the target position and use the PST mutator for the paste operation N avigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode Exiting STEP mode If you want to exit the STEP mode you may press ESC anytime to find yourself back in the PAGE mode Another option is to go back to the PAGE mode by pressing the PAGE mode button in the MODE selector section of the front panel Navigation Guide 30 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode 31 Step selections After having tweaked a step to anything we were looking for let s as sume that we are trying to make parameter changes to a group of steps in the page instead of just a single step Think of the classic ac cent scenario where some steps are supposed to play with a greater velocity than the rest One way to achieve that would be to use the method we have de
48. STEP VEL offset f PAGE_VEL factor FEEDER PIT MAP factor FEEDER PIT offset factorized EFF pool PIT offset PIT PIT MAP factor STEP PIT offset PAGE PIT offset DEFAULT 0 NOTE ATTRIBUTE VALUE TRACK STA MAP factor STEP STA offset TRACK GRV factor STEP GRV offset STA _ TRACK ORK OTSEL A DEFAULT 1 16 FEEDER LEN MAP factor _ FEEDER LEN offsetfactorized EFF_pool_LEN offset LEN TRACK LEN MAP factor STEPLENofset J DEFAULT 0 TRACKAMT MAP factor STEP AMT AMT Velocity Let s use the VEL attribute first as an example The default note VEL value is the Track velocity Per default this is 64 Then the track velocity is offset by the value generated by the effec tor The effector offset in turn is generated by a step offset in the feeder track factorized by its local VEL map factor In the default case where the effector does not apply this offset is o Next comes the offset generated by steps on our track Their offsets may be anywhere between 127 and 127 but can be modified in turn by the VEL map factor of our current track Finally the page VEL factor is applied to the value computed so far generating the final velocity value that is output via MIDI Note that this value is bound within the interval o 127 Pitch The pitch value is computed in a very similar fashion to the computa tion of the velocity value Navigation Guide 110 octopus
49. TRACK mode may also be keyed in using the matrix buttons Typically a single click will move the ones value to the pressed value a double click will set the ones value to zero and move the tens value to the double clicked value Track pitch direct entry You may have noticed that the pitch value is also indicated in the pitch inner circle on the right hand side as you change it and other wise Pressing the upper C key in the circle will transpose the track one octave up pressing the low C key will first transpose it to the C then one octave down Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track mutators You may have noticed that the mutator column has sev eral LEDs lit up They are labeled according to the mu tator functions that they trigger 4 Q M o 00000 tn Q E Signaling A lit up mutator indicates that it is available Please note that all mutator functions described here are also available from the PAGE mode as soon as a track is se 7 lected Track toggle TGL p This simply toggles the track on or off It is equivalent to muting or un muting the track when in PAGE mode H Track solo SOL Pressing the SOL button solo s the track within its page Note that no other pages playing concurrently will be affected Pressing it again will un solo the track in the page El z x m Track clear CLR CLR will recall the preset values for the selected track Only
50. V as the attribute to edit and dial in the phrase index using the main encoder You may browse through the preset phrases one by one first before deciding what would suit your mood or material Once you are happy with a particular phrase you can switch view to the POS attribute which determines the time compression factor of the step s phrase A low POS value means high time compression and vice versa There are three banks of preset phrases available green red and or ange banks with 16 phrases each They are grouped as follows Green note delays simple and rhythmic ones Red arpeggios and intervals triggered by the note Orange combinations of non deterministic values for STA VEL and PIT For example to delay a step by an undetermined number of ticks select one of the first 4 phrases in the orange bank So far we have only talked about preset phrases In case you were wondering yes you may edit the phrases yourself too in any way you like How that is done is explained in a separate section Having some fun with phrases Select a phrase for a step and its appropriate time compression POS value While still in Step mode press the Copy key to copy the step to the copy buffer In the bottom row select another step from the track by pressing its key If the step is empty you will see it blink red Now press the Paste button and you have made a copy of the original step including the phrase Move on and set a pitch
51. ach track s steps may be played using the same set of track parameters as its base While the preset chain modes were covered in the start up section we shall now look closer at flexible track chain configurations Selecting chain members While in PAGE mode define first the group of tracks that you would like to chain by creating an appropriate selection Creating a track chain While the selection is active blinking orange press the XXVIII button to build the chain made up by these tracks You will now see that they start playing in sequence The play se quence is per default top to bottom i e row 9 to row o There are cases when you will see this order changed as a result of some more interaction with the chain structures inside a page This has to do with the way a chain is defined internally Under the hood Every chain has a head and a tail The head is a track while the tail may be made of none one or more other tracks When you create a selection the top track of a selection will be de fined as the head of the new chain and the other selected tracks will make up the tail Should any of the newly chained tracks have been part of a chain be fore regardless if head or tail they will be removed from their origi nal chain s and added to the new one The original chains will simply get reduced by the tracks re allocated to the new chain Navigation Guide 42 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode
52. achments accessories specified by the manufacturer 12 Use only with the cart stand tripod bracket or table specified by the manufacturer or sold with the apparatus When a cart is used use caution when moving the cart apparatus combin ation to avoid injury from tip over PORTABLE CART WARNING pM per e c o 83125A 13 Unplug this apparatus during lightning storms or when unused for long periods of time 14 Refer all servicing to qualified service personnel Servicing is required when the apparatus has been damaged in any way such as power supply cord or plug is damaged liquid has been spilled or objects have fallen into the apparatus the apparatus has been exposed to rain or moisture does not operate normally or has been dropped 15 Do not expose this apparatus to dripping or splashing and ensure that no objects filled with liquids such as vases are placed on the apparatus WARNING THIS APPARATUS MUST BE EARTHED IMPORTANT Ensure that all the terminals are securely tightened and no loose strands of wire exist Before replacing the plug cover make certain the cord grip is clamped over the outer sheath of the lead and not simply over the wires AVIS POUR LES ACHETEURS CANADIENS DU OCTOPUS Le pr sent appareil num rique n ment pas de bruits radio lectriques d passant les limites applicables aux appareils num riques de la Class B prescrites dans le R glement sur le brouillage radio lectrique dict par le
53. ain configurations and enable in each of the pages the recording tracks Generally when a recording track is part of a chain the recording lock blinking red selector LED will carry along with the chase light in that track and move from one track of the chain to the next Note that the Track DIR setting will be followed even during MIDI recording Try taking the output of another sequencer and recording it while the Random or Brownian DIR is set Interesting things may happen Recording re take If you absolutely do not like what you have recorded you can always use the CLR functionality as we have seen it before Alternatively while in PAGE mode you may press the PLAY key to clear the track that is currently armed for recording Note that if the recording track is part of a chain the content of all tracks in that chain will be cleared Data intervals There is a limitation on the range of data that may be recorded While the MIDI protocol allows for pitch and velocity values to be in the range o 127 this range is constrained by the internal architecture of Octopus Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN We will explain what this means using the example of PIT the one you are most likely to first encounter in practice As you have seen in previous chapters the pitch of a note played by Octopus is computed as the sum of the track base pitch and the PIT offset of the p
54. al tools 129 ALL NOTES OFF message When the sequencer is not running but is defined as MIDI master or slave the 200 LED is lit either orange or green pressing the Stop button will send out an ALL NOTES OFF message controller 123 on each of the 32 MIDI channels Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools System load handling Natural bottlenecks The flexibility for composition offered by Octopus translates into possibly huge amounts of data being generated at a given time This makes two natural bottlenecks visible the bandwidth of the MIDI pipe and the capacity of the Octopus central processing unit CPU Load monitoring and dropping Octopus is built with timing stability in mind However too high loads of data would result in potentially massive glitches To prevent that Octopus constantly monitors its load Should any of the two bottlenecks be full load will start to get ig nored This is indicated to the user which may choose to reduce load in general or not being aware of what is going on Overload signaling and overload protection The CHORD block of the panel is used to indicate overload or po tential overload as follows Overload on the MIDI port is indicated by a red lit CHORD LED Overload of the MIDI2 port is indicated by a red lit CHORD2 LED What the lights really tell you is that the respective MIDI port pipe is too full to carry additional load and some MIDI d
55. also choose to have toggled pages start and stop immedi ately as you operate the TGL button For that you have to make sure that the master clock progress bar is lit green Navigation Guide 74 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools 75 To toggle between red and green you just press the Tempo button at the top right of the outer circle and you should see the color of the master clock progress bar change accordingly In summary there are two page switch modes which we call o clock and immediate To toggle between them simply press the Tempo button O clock is denoted by a red master clock indicator immediate by a green one Realigning pages When operating in the direct toggle mode green progress bar it is easy to get pages to play out of sync In order to get them all aligned back to the master clock you can press the ALN button like you did for tracks inside a page earlier on Grid mode page mutes In GRID mode when no page is grabbed i e held down the muta tor buttons take on a similar role to the one that the main MUT but ton has in PAGE mode that is toggle between a stored track mute pattern and back in the page that is momentarily playing in the GRID As such the colors of the LEDs should become clear an unlit LED means there is no page playing or the page does not have a mute pat tern neither stored nor active A green LED means there is a stored mute pattern that may be acti
56. articular step The track PIT value can be anywhere between o and 127 however the step PIT offset may be anywhere between 127 and 127 always taking the track PIT value as the reference point Quantized recording In the section on attribute map factors we have described the work ings of the factoring mechanism One application is non destructive quantization of track content including recorded material as you re cord it during a live session In order to get quantized output you may want to set the STA factor for the track to the lowest possible value case in which the map is not in effect Note that you may always increase the factor for the STA map in or der to gradually increase the amount by which steps are pulled or de layed during play Navigation Guide 120 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN MIDI Control Map learning While somewhat unrelated to what we have discussed so far another aspect of MIDI recording is the ability to have a MIDI Control Map learn from the MIDI input Entering MIDI Control Map mode Enter the MIDI Control Map mode by first disabling any recording mode if necessary and double clicking on one of the MIDI Control Map selectors 0 5 at the bottom of the matrix field Arm MIDI Control Map learning While in MIDI Control Map edit mode press the REC key to arm the learn mode As soon as you press the REC key you will see that a red blinking light will appear in the select
57. ata was poten tially dropped One way to work around this is to make sure you use both MIDI ports and distribute the load accordingly between the two CPU load is a bit trickier since the CPU has many tasks to complete For all practical purposes CPU overload means that not all data may have been processed by the CPU in a timeframe that would allow timing to stay relatively stable our subjective impression CPU over load is indicated in the CHORD to CHORD LEDs in two stages stage one indicates that CPU is at about 80 load This is shown by the CHORD3 CHORDs LEDs being orange Stage two indicates that the CPU is overloaded indicated by CHORD6 and CHORD LEDs lit up red All data that was not processed was obviously ignored Additional notes Navigation Guide 130 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools I3I You may observe at times that the CPU is overloaded while the MIDI pipes are not This means that the CPU is busy doing stuff other than sending MIDI One probable explanation is that you are probably making extensive use of the track speed multipliers For your understanding a track playing at 4x speed uses roughly 3 times more CPU cycles than a track playing at 1x speed Under respective circumstances it is possible to achieve CPU over load even at very low tempo values i e if a big enough data stack awaits to be processed but as a general rule lower tempo values allow for more load to be hand
58. avigation Guide 8 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance The front panel The Octopus front panel consists of visual groups which we will name here and to which we will refer in the course of this document They are explained in a left to right order MIX encoders Each row has a dedicated left rotary encoder in the MIX Mixer group SEL buttons Each row has a dedicated button in the SEL Selector group MATRIX The MATRIX refers to the field of 16x10 buttons The buttons take on various functions depending on the operating mode of the sequencer The most obvious one is probably when ma trix rows represent tracks of 16 steps each Right below the matrix is the MIX TARGET field which determines the functionality of the MIX rotary knobs MUT buttons Each row has a dedicated button in the MUT Mutator group EDIT encoders Each row has a dedicated left rotary encoder in the EDIT Editor group Circle The circle is made of buttons that provide a range of functionality that applies across modes and objects Among other controls the circle includes the SCALE MODE TRANSPORT and CHORD fields and the MAIN knob Each of the listed building blocks of the front panel takes on specific functions according to the active mode at any point in time 9 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II Fi
59. button on the bottom left side of the front panel The exported GRID content will take on the order of 37K and the circle is used to show the progression of the transmission All pages and full machine state export Two more options are available for SYSEX dump dump all pages at once via the SEL key and dump the full machine state at once via the EDIT key The same results may be achieved by several partial dumps as de scribed above Data transmission rate The throughput of SYSEX data is dependent on the tempo set at transmission time Adjusting it knowingly may be useful in cases where your external periphery needs a lower transmission rate than Octopus is potentially capable of providing Obviously a lower transmission rate will result in more time required by the dump to Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools complete You may want to experiment a bit to find the rate that is best suited for your particular setup Remarks Note that you can use the export functionality only while the se quencer is stopped This is a measure to ensure concurrent data integ rity of the SYSEX dump and timing stability of the material played You may however receive SYSEX data while the sequencer is playing This makes it particularly convenient to substitute memory content on the fly during performance Navigation Guide 136 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer Contact Contact genoQs Machines
60. bvious the new material is going to sound fresh right away And of course you can use both of these techniques combined to achieve the result that is best for you Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track remixes RMX The track remix is used to generate variations of a track without al tering it too much It does have some random elements which are in fluenced by the value indicated in AMT Below is an overview of what the RMX function does Influenced map Random map Random step shift offset see section on track attribute maps for details on what this means Track zoom ZOM The ZOM key is used to zoom into and out of certain views in this case it would zoom out of the Track mode and back into the Page mode The fact that you are zooming out is indicated by a red LED light as opposed to a orange one When in page mode hold one track selector down and press ZOM to zoom into the track this has the same effect as a double click on the track selector We will talk a bit more about the ZOM mutator when we describe the MAP mode Track Copy and Paste Copying and pasting tracks has already been described earlier A track is selected and copied into an internal clipboard and from there pasted into the chosen destination Navigation Guide 40 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode 4I Track selections Sometimes it may be convenient to make a change to more than one
61. ctopus at a glance I Connectors and SW1 ECCS T I The Octop s id RENTE ere tern 3 Navigation DASIC S25 dein t v odtrbl ra Sana IPOD aee CK usas parc a rb Eva PUE ead 4 Oa cag pum HMM UU TI NIMIRUM 5 orc o 6 yir 7 Mr ccc cheikh usp 7 IVES OFS P HM 7 Attri b t NN TE suv nce sva ve ve ace Sus bad R E E ea eaistasaa naancancias 7 feed do PREMIT epee eee ITI TT 8 MIDI Control CC Map Seriesiin aine esee okere en AULAE FIND A 8 The front pane Loupe ironian eaa e ed ou TOT AAA eea ENE NO SEAS EE EEEE er ER 9 II First steps II Connect dnd pov eO aon datei EERE E AREEN ENE a II General COS FOIS oe tertii den um eu a du me Em M Dena E aves Ep TOTS TTT Petes I3 Interface GODVEDELOBS ud auape edu p RON Roten dta du essa etude Rud unas e LAE IS BECP basic Operations ussiisa en tanner eee 16 Basic track onera bo HE Soie Dade efto erptcidrus sd live odia cei cis di abe rv re itd edad 18 Teack T EEs 21 Step real time C DOE oed autas reniras aariaa MR af rere verte 23 The MODE BlIOGGk aia si seat asen ps D Re Pal dba HEAR VER UA aai 24 III Step mode 25 ASIC OCI a OM MERO 25 Step ab DeL DATE Sco esas nt Bed ara EH MD UM I EGRE HU DI DD dn HEURE ERE DUE 26 Step Ni atelb Sound dvd aiat TORT TORTS TOF ONTPTIDR MT eT Tre rer terre M AME LUE
62. ding and reacting to MIDI IN data in a multi tude of ways This is yet another power tool in your hands The following sec tion digs into the details I13 Note stream recording Octopus is capable of recording incoming MIDI note MIDI control ler pitch bend and channel pressure data onto its tracks at se quencer runtime Note recording is polyphonic meaning that chords may be recorded in from an external keyboard onto a track Not only that but you may also record on more than one track at a time Moreover Octopus is capable of forcing MIDI input into its scale without actually recording the output and a few tricks more Arm recording To record a track got to PAGE mode press the REC key to activate the Recording mode and then simply hold a Track SEL button while pressing the REC key again to arm that oO track for recording e Press Play to start the sequencer if it was not playing and you are ready to start MIDI recording Use any external MIDI controller to record MIDI data on the se lected track Note that with one track armed for recording the MIDI input is automatically re channeled to the channel of the armed track While in stop mode this provides for a comfortable way to pre listen to what the tracks will output or to trigger their connected MIDI destination This is especially convenient as all data including notes pressure pitch bend and CCs are being routed through You can browse through the t
63. displayed with either green or red LEDs in the matrix Exactly one of them will blink orange pointing out to you the grid position of the page you are currently in Please refer to the introduc tory chapter on general concepts to get an overall view of what the grid is This function is a useful navigation tool showing you not only what else is going on in the grid but also where you are currently with re gard to some other content in the grid 51 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode The Mixer block In the previous sections we have talked to a large extent about what the EDITOR block does in short it is used to change the attributes of a selected entity where applicable DA The main task of the MIXER block on the other hand is to change a particular parameter of the tracks correspond ing to each of the knobs The parameter that is changed can s be selected directly using the MIX TARGET button set right below the matrix field bd While in PAGE mode you will see that one of the MIX target LEDs at the bottom of the matrix is lit possibly 2 ATR since this is the default setting and you probably have ee sos not changed it until now MIX 000000 00000 Viewing the MIX map Double click the ATR button This brings you to the MIX TARGET assignment where a parameter can be assigned to the MIX encoder group The Mix Target LEDs light all up indicating the selected
64. e 2 3 probability forward 1 3 probability reverse play 6 16 Same as 1 however the track play directions 6 16 may also be individually edited and changed as needed For details on user defined directions please refer to the dedicated section in this manual Track amount AMT AMT represents the amount of randomization applied to the track when the RND function is called Track groove GRV The GRV value determines how much shuffle is applied to the track the range is 0 16 Shuffle means that the steps with an even index in the track Q i e 2 4 6 16 will be played with a delay Generally the larger the GRV amount the longer the delay that makes up the shuffle One other intricacy is that the odd GRV values will produce steady shuffle delays while the even GRV values will produce delays that are variable within one 1 192 and which are determined at runtime The delay values applied are as follows Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Setting Delay 1 192 Track MIDI continuous controller MCC The MCC row determines whether or not this track sends MCC The none flag is represented as four green LEDs in the positions 13 16 The value range here is of course 0 127 and please keep in mind that a value of o does indicate a valid controller value Two exception are the BENDER and CHANNEL PRESSURE flags The BENDER flag is shown as a red dot in position 16 of the M
65. e A can play 4 times page B 2 times and page C r time The moar MIX TARGET number of repetitions can be any value between 1 and 16 where r is the default value In order to set the repetition value for a page simply keep it pressed and select the number of repetitions in row o for any number between 1 and 16 You may press on a page s key and you will see the repetitions value along with the currently left number of repetitions for play Another way of modifying a page s number of repeats is to hold the page in the grid while turning the STA knob in the edit block Page length LEN When pages play they are set per default to play 16 step positions after which they play another 16 steps and so on These rather natural sixteen 16th positions make up what we call the length of the page i e how many positions until the track wraps around However this value may be changed to a number higher or lower than the natural 16 For example assuming length 12 for a modified page playing along with a reference page with length 16 the modified page will play its first 12 positions after which it will play once more its first 4 positions After that it will start over from position 1 and so on Let s see briefly how this may be used As we have seen clustering pages is a way to create structures spanning more than one page If you have worked with pages that contain tracks of different lengths and had these be part of cluster
66. e aes aire endi tas etii External prosram echliadbbeassocete Gedeon dt eubaies XI Generaltools Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer Utility UNC CIO rc 127 MIDE clock sy nchronizati T sirina aiena ertet Fee eua 128 System load Wa i eta characteris tata teal aE a EEE 130 Saving the in tr ment SESTO ties ca stata ne top eub E i ea qa eM 132 Exporting memory content to MUD L eet rnnt en tn en nen obeobs 134 Contact 157 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance I Octopus at a glance This section provides an introduction to the concepts at the base of Octopus The impatient reader may come back to this section once confusion sets in and nothing makes sense anymore Connectors and switches Octopus has a variety of connectors and switches that you should be familiar with prior to operation They are listed below The power connector The power connector on the back of the Machine will take a 3 line cable Make sure to use a grounded power source for operation Oc topus has an auto sensing 110 240 Volt 50 60Hz power supply so you can safely power it up in most countries without extra adapters or converters All you need is a cable that fits your power outlet The power switch To turn Octopus on and off please use the black button labeled I O on the back panel of the machine next to the power connector The reset button The reddish reset button just under the
67. e in every row bank can be playing So there may be up to 90 tracks playing concurrently Page activation In order to activate a page for play you just hold it pressed and press TGL Repeat the procedure to make it not play any longer TGL will have an effect on a page only if the page is not empty i e lights red or green When you grab a page you will also see that there is a set of mutators available for the page Their semantics is very similar to that of tracks You may want to experiment a bit without knowing too much about the details of their implementation For the time being just make sure the page you are working on is also playing Page mutators SOL Will solo the page in the entire grid pressing SOL again will un solo it Only one page can be in solo mode at any one time Groups of pages playing concurrently are handled by the page sets feature described below CLR Will rest the page to default so make sure you are not calling CLR on a page whose contents you would rather keep RND WAll randomize the contents of the selected page giving a good play ground to inspire you Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools RMX Will call the Remix mutator function on each of the page s tracks ZOM We have looked at already it takes you into the page in question CPY This will copy the page to an internal buffer for later PST operations Once a CPY operation has tak
68. e will translate into immediate mappings onto the track pitches in the page at hand To activate the SCALE CAD please activate force to scale if not al ready active and then press CAD so it blinks red indicating opera tion In order to make the effect clearly visible on top of audible you may also want to select the MIX mode for the track pitches double click on the ATR key in the MIX TARGET field then select PIT Now modify the scale as described and you should see the changes to the track pitches as they materialize in the matrix Disabling the page scale You may want to have your page notes forced to the selected scale but not see the details behind that and also prevent any unintended changes to the scale essentially locking it In that case while in SCALE mode press ESC to leave the page forced to the scale but to exit the SCALE mode You will notice that the SCALE SEL LED will blink orange indicating that the page is forced to scale To go back into the scale edit mode simply press the orange blinking SCALE SEL LED The grid scale The GRID may be assigned a scale in the same manner that a scale is assigned to a page except the GRID scale will act globally To operate the GRID scale switch first to GRID mode Use the SCALE SEL button and proceed as already described in the section describing the PAGE Scale operation Exempting pages from the grid scale Navigation Guide 88 octopus MIDI Control Se
69. effect of the map is unchanged and therefore played through In the zero setting the STA and LEN step offsets will be ignored al together while in the 16 position the step offsets will be amplified by a total factor of roughly 2 As an example have a track play some default length notes and sim ply turn the LEN knob to the left You will hear that the note lengths are decreasing as you go and quite the opposite will happen as you turn the knob to the right For the STA factor use a track with notes playing off the beat so you hear the effect Reducing the factor will play the notes closer to the on the beat time effectively quantizing the play while increasing the factor will move the steps further away from the on the beat posi tion Navigation Guide 34 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode 35 On a side not in order to modify the actual length and start point of a track use the step skip option Track position POS The POS line will show the pattern of set steps in the _ track at hand 9 Q POS Turning the POS knob will shift the steps around depending on the turn direction modifying the contents of the play window just to use the same terms Track direction DIR This line indicates the chosen play direction for a track Consider it as an index into the following default mapping 1 Forward play 0 00000 2 Reverse play 3 Ping pong 4 Random order 5 Brownian i
70. en place you will see that the PST op eration becomes available For convenience explicitly and consciously against consistency holding the PAGE MODE button in GRID mode and pressing the button of a page in the grid will zoom into that page Page transposition When a page is selected in the grid you may notice that the pitch circle lights up It indicates the page s pitch offset and lets you modify it in order to transpose the entire page content in one place Alterna tively you may use the PIT encoder to adjust it as well To transpose the page by one full octave respectively you may use the High C and Low C keys in the circle Page velocity VEL factor Similar to the factors we see in conjunction with the track attribute maps there is a page velocity factor that may be adjusted from the grid mode The page velocity factor is a master determinant of the velocity produced by note content in a particular page Assuming the patch on your sound source is velocity sensitive you should be able to easily create fade ins and fade outs using this functionality Select a page in the grid and while selected turn the VEL encoder The numeric quadrant of the outer circle will display the factor value Page switch modes When switching pages in and out of the grid you will usually want them to start playing right on the beat and they will provided the progress bar of the master clock is lit red Immediate switching You may
71. erated upon using mutators or functions for example clear randomize modify copy paste and others While the modify function is mapped directly to the knobs as de scribed in the operation mode section the others are invoked by pressing the appropriate mutator buttons Attributes All of the above entities of Octopus have attributes associated with them The range includes but is not limited to Velocity Pitch Length Start Position and others Generally attributes can be modified in real time during play or stop Their semantics may differ across entities and not all attributes are applicable to all entities The attached table gives an overview of the entities and their applicable attributes VEL PT 7 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance Attribute Maps The attribute maps are basically views associated with Track objects which will allow you to view and edit directly the values of all steps in a track for a specific attribute For example the velocity map of a track will show you at a glance all step velocities allowing you to change them directly by the press of a button MIDI Control CC Maps The MIDI Control Maps are simply assignments of CC functionality to the Mixer knobs of Octopus You may use Controller Maps to freely assign MIDI Controllers and their appropriate channels to the Mixer knobs independently of what is going on in the current page N
72. ge blinking PAGE LED in the MODE field indicates that you are now in the PAGE mode For now it is enough to know that in this mode every row in the ma trix represents a track and every button represents a note or a step This is no different as you would probably expect anyways knowing that Octopus is a chase light pattern sequencer Let s press some but tons now Press any of the matrix buttons and you will see the steps go on in dicated by the green lights going on Pressing active steps will deacti vate them turning them off again Make sure that you set your connected sound device to MIDI Chan nel 1 If you do you should hear sound played by your synthesizer Step skip Toggling steps as we have seen before is sure fine another thing you may want to do though is skipping steps entirely Skipping a step means that the chase light will simply ignore the step and just move to the next un skipped one To skip a step press and hold the button of the step you want to skip and then click the MUT button You will see the step LED turn red Repeat the procedure for as many steps as you would like To un skip a step and make it play again in the regular fashion just press it by itself and you should see its light go off Press it a second time as long as you don t hold the MUT button pressed you will see it toggle on as an active step Step tweak Use what you have learned so far to compose a pattern in one of the t
73. ill be on the MIDI channel and controller chosen in their corresponding tracks See section on Track Attributes if you don t remember the details for setting up Track MIDI CCs Engage To activate the MCC state double click on the EDIT button turning it red Disengage To deactivate the MCC state just press the EDIT button once Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode Page mutator functions When in PAGE mode holding the PAGE key pressed will make some mutator functions available for the page itself the expected results should be quite obvious Applying them is a matter of pressing the appropriate mutator button TGL Pressing TGL will toggle the page play status in the grid SOL Page will be solo ed and un solo ed When solo ed the Page LED in the circle will blink green as opposed to orange CLR Using CLR on a page will reset the page to the default page values including resetting the tracks to their forward moving direction RND This will fill the page with random step patterns on all tracks Note that the track attributes are not affected just the step patterns RMX All tracks in the page will be applied the RMX function See track mode for details CPY Page can be copied to the copy buffer The copy operation will in clude the chain configuration local to the page at the time of copy PST Copy buffer will be pasted into the present page position Page POSITION in GR
74. ill simply start with the factory defaults Start up defaults The defaults include having the master tempo at 120 b p m all tracks running on direction r all tracks set to send on MIDI channel 1 of Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps port 1 and a particular pitch assignment for tracks o 9 as follows C3 D3 E3 G3 A3 C5 D5 E5 G5 and As Octopus may be reset to this default condition at any time during operation Resetting to start up defaults Please note that doing this will erase any changes you have made and possibly want to keep so use this with extreme caution Press and hold the GRID mode button while pressing the CLR but ton Again this only clears the RAM volatile memory contents and leaves the content of the FLASH non volatile memory untouched Navigation Guide 12 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps 13 General controls Octopus features a set of transport buttons which are no different from what you may know from other devices Start Stop and Pause functions are available Play Press any of the play buttons in the transport section as depicted SRANSFORE o It makes no difference which one you press as long as they show an arrow in O o their label The difference between them i will appear later so please bear with us for a moment You will see the red chase light move across the matrix If you do not hear anything it i
75. ine up all tracks in a page simply press the ALN button This will re synchronize all tracks to the Octopus global master clock as explained in the section on the GRID mode As a side comment the chase light will also be realigned whenever you Stop and then play a sequence Pause and Resume pressing pause again will not realign the chase light Interface locking Sometimes you may want to hide the Octopus from preying eyes or even unauthorized button pressers At any time regardless of the playing status of the machine you can engage the interface lock by holding GRID and pressing ESC at the same time The result will be that only the tempo LED will remain lit and blink at the rate of the internal clock All other LEDs will be turned off and seemingly all keys will be disabled The only operating knob will be the tempo knob In order to unlock the machine you may double click on the GRID mode button to return to normal operation in GRID mode Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools MIDI clock synchronization MIDI clock selection Per default Octopus does not send or react to MIDI Clock informa tion However Octopus may act as a MIDI clock source in your setup or will synchronize to some other source The MIDI clock state is selected and indicated by the button LED numbered 200 in the top part of the outer circle When Octopus is MIDI clock master MIDI Clock signal will be
76. ion indicated by the blinking light in the MIX TARGET row By default it should be 1 Now press the 2 key in the MIX TARGET area and the selection will disappear This is because step selection 2 is empty Let s fill it Press and hold the SEL button and select another step or more and watch them blink Press the 1 in the MIX target area and you should see your previous selection blink active You can toggle between your selections at will using the MIX TARGET buttons and use the encoders to really bend your material Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools MIDI Control Maps As already introduced in the section on PAGE mode you may assign MIDI Control CO functionality to the MIX encoders This is useful when you are looking to control some parameters of a more global nature such as certain instrument volumes or other things that are not specifically bound to a particular page There are 6 MIDI Control Maps You may switch between them di rectly by pushing their corresponding buttons in the MIX target sec tion of the panel Note that unlike in PAGE mode when you use MIDI Control Maps in GRID mode the modified values are not shown Navigation Guide 78 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools Page sets When you have a certain number of pages in the GRID which you are tweaking and playing in various combinations you will eventually find combinations that you wou
77. is equipment generates uses and can radiate radio frequency energy and if not installed and used in accordance with the instructions may cause harmful interference to radio communications However there is no guarantee that interference will not occur in a particular installation If this equipment does cause harmful interference to radio or television reception which can be determined by turning the equipment off and on the user is encouraged to try to correct the interference by one or more of the following measures Reorient or relocate the receiving antenna Increase the separation between the equipment and receiver Connect the equipment into an outlet on a circuit different from that to which the receiver is connected Consult the dealer or an experienced radio TV technician for help European Union regulation compliance statement This symbol indicates that your product must be disposed of properly according to local laws and regu lations CAUTION RISK OF ELECTRIC SHOCK DO NOT OPEN CAUTION TO REDUCE THE RISK OF ELECTRIC SHOCK DO NOT REMOVE COVER OR BACK NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE REFER SERVICING TO QUALIFIED SERVICE PERSONNEL The lightning flash with arrowhead symbol within an equilateral triangle is intended to alert the user to the presence of uninsulated dangerous voltage within the product s enclosure that may be of sufficient magnitude to constitute a risk of electric shock
78. is velocity sensitive you will hear the change instantly At this point we encourage you to use what you have learned so far to play and experiment projecting your knowledge on the other things we haven t describe yet Why don t you start modifying the Track DIR or GRV and see what happens Pausing tracks and step forwarding A track may be paused by grabbing the track holding the appropriate track selector pressed and pressing the Pause transport button The procedure applies also to a selection of more than one track When a selected track is paused and the Pause button is clicked again all paused tracks will advance one step but still remain paused To un pause all paused tracks in a page select one of the paused tracks and press the Play button Re triggering tracks Tracks may also be re triggered such as to start playing on the first non skipped step they contain To re trigger a track simply hold it selected in PAGE mode and press the ALN key The track will re trigger immediately and will not be aligned to the master clock To do a full realignment press ALN again Navigation Guide 20 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps 2I Track chaining Let s assume for a moment that we are back to having two tracks with the second one originating from the first but modified to your taste in the meantime If this is not the case let s reset and reconstruct that scenario You already know all moves it
79. istributor is authorized to offer any variation from this policy Limited warranty genoQs Machines units are sold with tree year full warranty This warranty covers all malfunctions that may occur from normal use Damage caused by careless handling improper voltage connected exposure to damp abuse etc is not covered The unit can only be returned for repair after agreement from genoQs Machines Customer covers cost of shipping of malfunctioning unit from customer to genoQs Machines genoQs Machines covers shipping from genoQs Machines back to customer genoQs Machines agrees to offer spare parts and service for all units produced by genoQs Machines also after the warranty expires as long as is possible The warranty applies to the physical unit and applies also for customers buying units second hand where the war ranty still is valid The warranty is void without a readable serial number label FCC compliance statement This device complies with part 15 of the FCC rules Operation is subject to the following two conditions 1 This device may not cause harmful interference and 2 this device must accept any interference received including interference that may cause undesired operation NOTE This equipment has been tested and found to comply with the limits for a Class B digital device pursuant to Part 15 of the FCC Rules These limits are designed to provide reasonable protection against harmful interference in a residential installation Th
80. ks will continue playing in sync with all active ones but their output will not be sent out to MIDI This provides more immediate and intuitive handling of material in live situations Navigation Guide 76 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools 77 Working with step selections Inverse step selection editing In PAGE mode active step selections are edited using the EDIT en coders for the respective attribute Additionally when a step selection is active the steps that are not se lected in the tracks that contain selected steps may be edited as well using the MIX encoders of the respective attribute For example assuming a step selection is active with steps selected in tracks 2 and 4 the EDIT encoder PIT modifies all steps in the step selection while the MIX encoder 8 will modify the pitch of all steps that are not currently selected in the tracks 2 and 4 Step selection stores In PAGE mode active step selections are stored for later recall in one of 5 stores available per page This allows to group steps and modify them at once beyond track boundaries The stores 1 5 are accessible while a step selection is active via the buttons labeled 1 2 3 4 5 in the MIX TARGET row below the matrix Just to give you an example To make a step selection hold the SEL button pressed and click on at least one active step green in the page You should see the selected step blink green and the current select
81. l a global function Playing MIDI Controller Maps MIDI Controller Maps may be edited and operated directly from both the GRID and the PAGE level Select one of the MIDI Controller Maps o 5 You will see that the LED for the corresponding map is lit orange to show that it is cur rently active Timeout The MIXER block may be used at any time during PAGE mode op eration In order to make the effects visible once you operate any of the MIX encoders in PAGE mode you will see its value displayed briefly in the corresponding matrix row The value will disappear shortly after you have performed the last click to clear the view for the regular contents of the track Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode EDIT state Octopus provides a quick way of previewing steps in the sce sense that you can immediately hear what they contain and how they would play under the chase light SD This is particularly interesting of course when you are tweak ing something to sound just right By default in PAGE mode the EDIT LED button lights steady green Click on it once to toggle it to blinking orange When the EDIT LED is lit steady green everything behaves as you know it the step buttons toggle the step states When turned to blinking orange you are in the EDIT state To return to the default state steady green press the EDIT button twice again twice and not double click Editing Steps Fir
82. lay Plus there is another red light potentially lighting up labeled 100 That adds 100 to the number For example 143 would be represented by the LEDs 100 1 2 and 4 lighting red and 3 lighting green One exception to the rule is numbers where the tens and the one are the same digit in that case the digit in question will light orange For example 77 will be displayed as 7 LEDs with LED 1 6 lighting red and LED 7 lighting orange Experiment a bit with this and you will get a good feel for this repre sentation quickly You will re encounter it at many other occasions as we move along Click convention While we are here we can introduce another convention pe cp the click convention You can directly select a value by pressing the buttons in the tempo area Double click on a number to set the tens MUT red value and single click to set the one s green value For example double click on 7 and single click on 2 to set a tempo of 72 Note that by just double clicking on a number the ones value is set to Zero This makes it very quick and easy to select round values like 60 80 or 120 Selecting non round values is just one more click away As with the number display convention the click convention is used all across the instrument s interface so we will run into it over and over again Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps Step basic operations Step toggle The oran
83. ld like to recall quickly Concurrent page activation Octopus can store the pointers of all active pages at a given time in what we term a Page Set Activating or switching between Page Sets can then be done by the press of a button at playtime The operation is equivalent to and a shortcut to toggling a set of pages on with all the rules that apply only one page per bank will play banks determine cluster behavior page length is determined in the pages Working with Page Sets Simply activate in the matrix the set of pages that you would like to store for recall Once they are all playing press and hold the green SEL button while you press any of the 16 buttons in row o The buttons in row zero represent memory slots for storing your page sets You will notice that once you have stored a set into a slot its corre sponding LED turns green indicating that the set of that slot is now playing in the grid Now press the button of an empty slot you will see that all pages stop playing the slot LED lights orange it is empty and the previ ously saved slot is lit red because it is not playing Pressing the red slot button will recall the page combination you had defined before for this particular slot RCL CLR O SEL 10 11 1 14 0000000000000000 79 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools Grid Track mode The GRID TRACK mode may be imagined as a sub mode
84. le button XIV and it should m cap O blink orange while the Chr scale LED is 9 aO lit orange w o om o Om 9 This picture is telling us that the chro z ts matic C scale is currently active but that o o o o we may select any notes in our current oe SAE o scale The Select button you have just 6 O pressed is used to let you select the notes that you would like to add to your scale Now press any of the note keys in the scale circle to toggle the corre sponding notes into and out of the scale putting together any scale you like Once you are done selecting the scale notes you may press SCALE MOD again and now you can modify again the base pitch of the scale you have just selected Another way to select a scale is to press any of the scale buttons in the outer circle to get the scale structure associated with their label always on the base tone indicated by the orange LED Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VIII Musical tools Changing the scale base In order to change the base tone press the SCALE MOD button to enter the scale modulation mode Here you may select any of the cur rent scales tones as the new scale base As you change the scale base you will see the scale signature carry over to the new base as well Scale cadence mode Another way of operating the Scale data is to combine it with the CAD functionality What this means is that any changes done to the scal
85. led Final remarks Note that the two bottlenecks are serially connected CPU first MIDI second They also know of each other in the sense that if a MIDI pipe is full the CPU will not process for it more data it gets dropped anyways until it sees that the data really gets sent out of the MIDI pipe This is to save resources for other tasks such as executing key presses rotary turns or display updates When Octopus is under very high load you may possibly see slight glitches of the display For example it may seem that the chaser light is not being moved correctly This is just a visual issue and may occur because sequencer operations have higher priority than processing visual data System design flaw This leads us to our final remark since this topic did raise some ques tions in the past we are confident and time has proven us right that the amount of resources available under the clip level of the over load protection mechanism is in no way representing a constraint to the user s work and we do not see an issue To translate into an analogy from the synthesizer world we rarely see an issue if the number of voices available does not correspond to the number of keys on the keyboard By the same token a synthesizer with a 61 key keyboard and polyph ony below 61 is surely not subject to a flawed design Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI General tools Saving the instrument state Oc
86. m values for each column and RMX allows you to call and actually observe what the RMX operation is doing to your track parameters ZOM which is now lit red will take you back to the track mode without un selecting VEL and pressing ZOM again from there will bring you again into the map mode Shifting maps The POS knob in the Editor block is also assigned a function turn it and you will see your attribute map just shift around the track with out affecting the step toggle states or the other attribute maps but having certainly surprising effects on your sequence Switching tracks You may fetch any track into the map view by simply ticking to the left or right it doesn t matter the mix encoder corresponding to the map you want to fetch into the display Track CC map resolution Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics Track CC maps have a specific property associated with them and that is resolution Per default Track CC messages are sent on each step according to the respective track and step MCC values In addition intermediate CC messages may be sent between CC steps This effectively in creases resolution of the CC stream resulting in smoother controller flows In MAP mode with MCC as the selected attribute the resolution for the current track may be selected by using the chord button block The minimum and default value is 1 meaning that one Track CC message is sen
87. minist re des Communications du Canada This digital apparatus does not exceed the Class B limits for radio noise emissions from digital apparatus set out in the Radio Interference Regulations of the Canadian Department of Com munications VENTILATION Do not prevent the unit s ventilation especially by placing the unit on soft carpet in a narrow space or by placing objects on the unit s chassis top side or rear panels Always keep the unit s chassis at least 10 centimeters from any other objects CHANGES OR MODIFICATIONS NOT EXPRESSLY APPROVED BY THE MANUFACTURER FOR COMPLIANCE COULD VOID THE USER S AUTHORITY TO OPERATE THE EQUIP MENT COPYRIGHT NOTICE genoQs Machines Octopus is a computer based device and as such contains and uses software in ROMs This software and all related documentation including this Operator s Manual contain proprietary informa tion which is protected by copyright laws All rights are reserved The software and its documentation is open source and therefore may be copied adapted transferred or modified to the extent permitted by the GPL GNU Public License octopus MIDI Control Sequencer Introduction Welcome and sincere congratulations to the purchase of your new sequencer a genuine genoQs Machines Octopus You now own one of the definitely finest MIDI instruments ever built We proudly put in your hands a device built to drive your creativity and provide you joy for years to come
88. n turns green Pressing the MUT button will immediately un mute all muted tracks and you will see it turn red Pressing it again will recall your mute previous mute pattern This functionality is provided to allow for quick mute and un mute operations during live play for instance and the last selected mute pattern is stored Therefore removing all mutes in a page manually i e using the mute buttons directly will also remove the stored mute pattern and make the MUT LED go off Transposing tracks Remember we wanted to experiment a bit with a track let s trans pose it By now you probably know how this works anyway Grab the track turn the PIT knob clockwise and hear how the track is being transposed up Shown above is how you would transpose track 3 Shifting tracks Now un mute both tracks you should hear them play at the same time on different pitches You may want to tune them as you learned until you get an acceptable result Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps Now grab one of the tracks and turn the POS knob This shifts the track forward or backward depending on your turning direction Changing velocity and other attributes To make things a bit more interesting take one of the two playing tracks and increase its velocity do we still ve really need to explain how this works You grab the track and turn its velocity encoder clockwise 3 If your sound source
89. nd the associated data and will perform the recording of the controller accordingly A fun exercise may be to enter MAP mode and observe the MCC values while turning a knob on your controller and watch the MIDI CC input being recorded as it comes in Please note that tracks whose MCC value is other than none i e 4 green LEDs in the positions 13 16 will have an orange chase light in PAGE mode Considerations Remember that a track may only play one controller at once Therefore if you have created a controller map for some controller and then operate some other controller the map will play the con troller data for the last auto sensed controller This includes pitch bend and channel pressure which are handled by Octopus in a similar fashion to a controller Note that pitch bend data is recorded using two value bytes as speci fied in the MIDI protocol essentially with an available resolution of 14 bits However when editing the MCC data you will currently only operate on the most significant 7 bits of the value This allows working with bender data to fit the model of working with MIDI CC data When clearing the Track CC map CLR note that also the least sig nificant 7 bits will be cleared Navigation Guide 116 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN II7 Step note recording Octopus offers an alternative to note stream recording and that what we term step note recording Note that this is no
90. ng about the Grid row that a page resides on Pressing any of the green lit buttons will take you directly to the cur rently playing page in that bank Turning the main knob will incrementally take you through the play ing pages Exiting bank view Press the Tempo button to return to the standard Tempo display Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode Play mode The PLAY mode provides the capability to try new things in a page in a non destructive manner Activating the PLAY mode is equivalent to taking a snapshot of the currently playing page in a bank for later recall in case the results of your editing do not live up to your expectations Notably the play mode snapshots include track mute patterns of the respective pages Also note that engaging the PLAY mode may be done from both page mode and from grid mode Engaging play mode To activate the PLAY mode press the green PLAY button DEA in the MODE block and you should see it blink orange Also you will notice that the Program button will be lit red Now make all the changes and editing that you need to make to your page until you reach a point of satisfaction or possibly slight regret Make changes permanent To keep the page simply press Program to make the changes perma nent Discard changes To discard the changes press PLAY again exiting the PLAY mode and recalling the state of the page from just before you started
91. ng the green follow button to turn it red Deactivate Follow by toggling it back to green Track chord stacks The steps of a track may be stacked with pitches from a se lected scale To select a scale please follow the instruction in i the section describing the scale mode The CHORD stack indicator shows how many notes the stack will contain Using the example of a three note chord on a track containing steps all in C and a selected scale of C major we would now have the track play on each set step a chord of C E G This as signment is fixed for all notes on the track Navigation Guide 48 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode However a step that is set to play a chord see section on step chords will not be influenced by the track chord stack In other words the track chord stack will be overruled by step chord settings 49 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode V Page mode Page mode is the level at which you play Octopus in the step sequencer tra ditional way the Matrix field is now a field of 10 tracks and 160 steps waiting to be played Basic operation We have all along used the page mode as a starting point from where we have been zooming into the other elements notably tracks and steps so far It is time to take a closer look at what else is going on in the PAGE mode itself By holding down the PAGE button in the Mode block generally all pages that contain data will be
92. notes are green Step polyphony Step polyphony offers an exciting playground for experimentation and variation especially with regard to dynamic pitch variation as in random note picks from the chord pool Assuming you have built the C E G chord as described earlier let s think about polyphony The natural polyphony of the step is of course 3 since it is playing 3 notes at the same time However polyphony may be adjusted independently of step chord contents i e without changing the number of notes in the chord The step chord size i e the number of notes in a step J is indicated by a red LED in the chord block The step polyphony is indicated by a green LED in the chord J Q block When chord size and polyphony are the same you see an orange LED in the chord block at the re Oo spective position CHORD Random note picks from chord pool A step whose polyphony and chord size are the same will play a chord in the traditional sense as you would expect it When step polyphony and chord size are different the number of played chord notes is always the smaller of the two values i e chord size or polyphony Here the actual notes are chosen at random from a pool composed as follows Navigation Guide 84 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VIII Musical tools 85 When chord size is greater than polyphony the note pool is made up by all notes that make up the chord When polyphony is greater than the chord si
93. ny press the blinking note button again and the blink will disappear The Matrix The matrix shows one of the four main attributes VEL PIT LEN STA of all 8 phrase notes together one note per row Row 1 shows the data for phrase note 1 row 2 shows note 2 etc A green LED lit at the end of the row means that the phrase has a note defined for that line If you don t see any green LEDs lit on those lines you know the phrase has a zero note count A red LED is shown there only for phrase 0 which is read only Top row always shows the phrase type coded as a number of orange LEDs The available phrase types are as follows Type r Forward notes are played in the order 1 2 3 lype2 Reverse notes are played in the order 8 7 6 Type 3 Random pitch programmed notes pitches are played in random order determined at playtime Type 4 Random all programmed note attributes played in random combinations determined at playtime Navigation Guide IOC octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics IO7 For example 4 orange LEDs means the phrase has type Random all as described above MIXER Block The top four orange LEDs in the MIXER block indicate the attrib utes available for editing which are VEL PIT LEN and STA in top down order The currently active attribute is blinking orange To se lect another attribute simply press the associated button This will change the content shown in the mat
94. o from left to right you are just delaying C pushing the step every time by 1 192 of a note The maximum push is 5 192 Turn the knob back until you reach the default position i e all LEDs are off Now turn the knob further back and you see now a green bar growing from right to left starting on position 16 of the row you are pulling the step to the front of the beat The current maximum pull is 5 192 Note that the real effect of this setting is directly dependent on the value of the track STA attribute Step amount AMT The next parameter in line would be AMT amount We will get into the details later for now it is enough to mention that this indicates the amount to which an event programmed on this step will affect the current track Step phrasing GRV A Step may be enriched at playtime by a certain amount of notes determined by phrases that are pre programmed into Q something we call phrases There are three banks of 16 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode phrases for a total of 48 They are roughly covering delays rhythmic delays and note intervals respectively As you turn the GRV encoder to the right you will see the phrase number increase from 1 to 16 o means no phrase is selected Once 16 is reached in a bank the color of the pointer LED will switch to the next bank as you can tell from the color Step phrase time compression POS The POS value will become vi
95. of 2 this means that the net PIT offset for row o is 3 1 2 2 72 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics Remarks The values fed into the effector are really the deltas between the ac tual step offset for a given attribute and the default value of that at tribute In the above example the default step offset was always o The first remark here is that the offsets fed into the effector may ob viously be both positive and negative The second remark to make is that the attribute values fed into the effector by both feeders and listening feeders will be influenced by the factor set for that particular track Using EFF with events The effector may be used in conjunction with using events to modu late the track attribute map factors We will not elaborate further on the possible results and leave it as an exercise to the reader but this does open quite new ways of cross modulation among the page tracks Playing the Effector Feeders On to the operation of the Effector Just as a reminder the Effector is a track specific attribute and as such it must be toggled either in TRACK mode or from PAGE mode by grabbing the track and press ing the TGL button in the MUT column Setting a track to be a feeder is done by pressing its EFF mutator and toggling its EFF state to green It is important to note that a Feeder track need not contain any ac tive Steps i e need not play any note
96. of time it takes to play all steps in a track Makes sense Realizing this is the key to understanding how editing directions works Triggers and slices Each of the 16 slices needed to play a track from end to end no skips for now specifies its own chaser light position trigger For the for ward direction in slice 1 we have a trigger for chaser light position r in slice 2 a trigger for position 2 etc In simple terms when a track is played the chaser light will be moved according to the triggers specified by the slices that make up that particular direction For example the reverse direction has the trigger sequence 16 15 14 1 assigned to its slices Full and empty slices Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics To take it one level further a slice is not restricted to holding only one trigger but may hold up to nine triggers These nine triggers will be played in sequence every time the respec tive slice is being played This implies that a slice may take as long as nine times to play completely because it fires up to nine triggers So what do we get from empty slices i e where no trigger is speci fied Well every time Octopus gets an empty slice it will pick a trig ger for you at random and play it normally Certainty next The sequence of slices is per default set to be a solid 1 2 3 16 But you can change that Each slice has an associated certainty next pa
97. ondly a program change message will be sent every time the Pro gram key is pressed in TRACK mode regardless of all other circum stances However if you keep the Program key pressed while turning the knob the program change messages will get sent as you increase or decrease the PC number via the main knob Furthermore all program changes contained in the tracks of a page will be sent once as soon as that page is enabled for play either as part of a cluster or by manual intervention MIDI bank changes You can also issue bank change messages This is done simply by pressing the Select button and turning it orange In that case the number displayed will correspond to the bank num ber and the bank change message will get sent as soon as you press the Select button again Navigation Guide 44 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Bank change messages will be sent also when a page is activated for play but not when you send program change messages from Track mode 45 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track tempo multipliers o change a track s tempo multiplier go to Track mode and use the To ch track s t ultipli to Track mode and use th play buttons with one two or four triangles in the transport bar For example by double clicking on the gt gt and gt gt gt gt buttons the tempo will be set to 4 and 4 respectively of the master tempo The table below shows
98. or column of the page Select target Pressing across the selector buttons will move the position of the red light and effectively select the encoder for which we want to make the assignment Per default you will see the amounts of the map displayed and this is the most spectacular place to be if you are turning knobs on an ex ternal controller you will see the amounts of the learning encoder go up and down immediately However note that the MIDI channel and the controller number are recorded as well Disable MIDI Control Map learning Simply press the REC key again to exit MIDI Control Map learning mode and you may switch the view of the MIDI Control Map ac cordingly to verify your results Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN External force to scale Forcing MIDI notes to an Octopus scale While in page mode with the page armed for recording press and hold PAGE while clicking RECO your external MIDI input will be forced to the scale of the current page Of course this is assuming you have a scale enabled for the respective page This is especially interesting in performance situations obviously MIDI merge By selecting a chromatic scale for your page you can effectively im plement a MIDI merger functionality of the data your Octopus is producing and the data that you provide on the MIDI in port Note that this is only applying to note data and not to other MIDI data such as con
99. ost toggle Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps Basic track operations Since you now have a pattern you like but still want to explore let s make an identical copy of your track pattern first and then modify the copy while keeping the original safe ZOM CPY On the left side of the Octopus panel you see a block called SEL to the right of the MIX rotary en coder block These are the Selector buttons PST o 0 0 oO Q z B a E Symmetrically to the right you see another block called MUT to the left of the EDIT rotary encoder block These are the Mutator buttons For now we will use the selector button corresponding to our track to grab it and do something in this case copy it RCL CLR O SEL MUT o Copying tracks Go ahead and press the track selector button of the corresponding TRACK and keep it pressed You will see some changes in the LED pattern of the panel dont worry about it for now You will see that once you have grabbed a track the mutator block becomes active and you see that the CPY mutator is now lit orange Press the CPY mutator and release the track move your finger off the selector You have just copied the track you have grabbed to an internal buffer You have not copied the full track data but only a reference to it This means that at the time of the paste operation you will get the most recent data of the just copied track and not
100. quencer VIII Musical tools 89 Note that by definition the GRID scale is overruled by any other scales active in particular pages Therefore an easy way to exempt a page from the grid scale is to force that page to a chromatic scale This may be particularly useful in the case of percussive material for example Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics IX Advanced topics The following describes topics and features that will put to your hands a great deal of power leveraging some of the unique capabilities of Octopus OI Track direction editing As we have seen in earlier sections each Octopus track may be as signed its own running direction This is exciting but neither new nor spectacular What may catch your attention though is that on the Octopus you can not only specify what direction a track should play but in most cases also edit that direction to your particular gusto Directions 1 5 are read only while directions 6 16 are user editable Interested To see how all this works let s take a quick step back and realize a couple of things Then you will see how the pieces fall into place A general view on directions To begin have a track run at the default forward direction Direction 1 Let it run for a few cycles in the forward direction then stop Think about what you just saw the forward direction is really the sequence of chaser light positions in each of 16 slices
101. r button was not mentioned yet and that is the EFF mu tator What is EFF To be precise EFF is not as much a function as it is a state switch enabling the track to participate in cross modulation across the PAGE Some additional explanation is needed here so let s start with the theory In each Octopus page there is the notion of an Effector In simple terms the effector is a mechanism allowing tracks inside a page to modulate other tracks inside the same page Modulation here refers to projecting Step attribute offsets from one track to another at a time at which the modulator track is being played The affected Step attributes are Step VEL PIT LEN and MCC Octopus EFF Overview c o o I o o o o LL Listen red Feed Listen feed 9 Feed Listen feed 9 feed 6 EFF adder Listen feed 9 6 3 2 SEL Navigation Guide 102 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics 103 The EFF mechanism The modulation is always happening top down i e upper tracks may modulate lower tracks but not vice versa Here upper and lower refers to the respective track index For ex ample track 9 may modulate all other tracks but track o cannot modulate any other track Feeders Listeners and Listening Feeders Modulator tracks are called feeders and modulated tracks listen ers for a better distinction of terms Because the effect of the feede
102. r tracks is additive down the track in dexes you may picture the feeder tracks as feeding the effector and listener tracks listening to whatever is in the effector at their particu lar index slot A track may also be both a listeners and a feeder which we call a lis tening feeder This means that if that track itself is playing notes then the attributes of those notes are modulated while the resulting values will modulate the corresponding listeners below it Effector dry run In the example below Track 9 is feeding its Step offsets for VEL PIT and LEN into the effector This means that all listeners in the page may be modulated by those offsets In this example we have set tracks 8 4 and o as listeners and therefore to be modulated by track 9 s offsets Assuming that Track 9 is currently at a Step whose PIT offset is 3 and assuming no other feeders exist the notes played in the tracks 8 4 and o will be played 3 semitones higher than defined in those tracks for the current position But track 6 is also a feeder and modulates all listeners below it i e Tracks 4 and o Assuming that the current Step in track 6 has a PIT offset of 1 listener tracks below will see a total PIT modulation ef fect of 3 1 2 Similarly Iracks 3 and 2 are set as further feeders which means that the last listener Track o is being modulated by four feeders Tracks 9 6 5 and 2 Assuming Tracks 3 and 2 each have a Step PIT offset
103. rack For example if PIT pitch is selected every rotary will change the pitch of its assigned row Preset MIDI CC s The MIDI CC s behave the same as the ATR targets The CC s used are VOL 7 PAN 10 MOD 7 EXP 11 MIDI Control Maps Using a MIDI Controller Map any MIX knob can be assigned an in dividual CC on a chosen MIDI channel As an example double click on MAP o to select MIDI Controller Map o You will notice that the AMT button will blink orange indi cated that AMT is selected The matrix shows the per track AMT values which is really the CC amount set on each of the tracks Press the MCC button Here the Matrix shows the actual Midi Con tinuous Controller assigned to each of the tracks You can modify the CC for every individual track using the MIX knobs Remember that four green LEDs in positions 13 14 15 and 16 indicate that no CC has been assigned Now press the MCH button This view allows you to assign the MIDI channel on which the CC signal is sent Note that this is not the MIDI channel of the Track the track s MIDI channel is an entirely independent parameter Finally the settings that you have just made are stored as a MIDI Controller Map There is a total of 6 MIDI Controller Maps and Navigation Guide 54 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode 55 they are global This is useful because you can have MIDI map oper ate beyond the context of a page as they fulfil
104. racks Start the sequencer or dE and you will hear the pattern played boring as it O us is since all steps are set to a default level Let s change that but tweaking some Step attributes We will use PIT here as an example Just grab a Step by pressing its button and keeping it pressed Gt doesn t matter if it s originally on or off Now turn the PIT rotary encoder clockwise to increase the pitch of the step Navigation Guide 16 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps 17 Turning PIT counterclockwise will decrease the pitch one half tone per encoder click The PIT rotary is the second one from the top of the EDIT block You will now hear that the pitch of the step has changed every time the chase light passes it Feel free to experiment as you wish with other attributes and refer to the section on STEP mode for details Grab other steps and play around until you shape your pattern into something you like before moving on Ghost toggle Press and hold pressed two or more step buttons placed in separate rows but in the same column Let s use for instance the rows 3 and 4 Press a step in row 3 and at the same time a step in row 4 and make sure you do not release the buttons yet Now toggle steps in row 3 and you will see that the steps in the same column of row 4 will be toggled as well Or you may press steps in row 4 and see the steps in row 3 toggle as well We call this behav ior gh
105. racks in a page by selecting them one by one and have the record selection state move along Together with the noted re channeling behavior you can use a single MIDI key board to play and hear all tracks in both Stop and Record mode Record rehearsing Sometimes you may just want the re channel capability described above but without the actual recording being done This is useful Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN when you want to play along an instrument of a given track but do not want to record straight away To enter record rehearsing make sure all record activity is off no track SEL blinking red the REC key is not blinking red Now hold a track SEL button pressed and click on the REC button The Track SEL LED will blink red indicating rehearse mode Press ing the REC key again will finally enable recording for the armed track Multitrack recording In order to record on more than one channel at a time you may make a multi track selection and press the REC just as above However note that in multitrack recording the MIDI source to be recorded needs to send on the same MIDI channel as that of the des tination tracks i e the one you have just armed for recording Also make sure to send the MIDI data into the correct MIDI IN port on the Octopus i e the one that the track is set to send on IN 1 or 2 To cancel multitrack recording press a track selector in combination with the S
106. rix The rotaries in the MIXER block are used to change the currently selected attribute for the note on the matching row The rotary of row 9 at the top is used to change the phrase type Mutator block The following buttons in the MUTATOR block are supported CLR The CLR button will clear the whole phrase to empty if the phrase was non empty When pressed again in an empty phrase it will re store to the factory preset phrase When pressed while grabbing one of the four orange attribute but tons in the MIXER block CLR will only clear the data of the se lected attribute RND The RND button will randomize the whole phrase When pressed while grabbing one of the four orange attribute buttons in the MIX block RND will randomize the data of the selected attribute CPY and PST The CPY and PST buttons will allow phrases to be copied and pasted between slots in the phrase bool Note that phrase 7o can only be copied from EDIT Block Some of the rotaries in the EDIT block are supported POS The POS knob changes the groove of the current phrase in a very nice way When turning to the right it stretches the timing to the next available straight triad or dotted version of the original and when turned to the left it does a similar thing by compressing the Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics phrase tempo This allows one to try a triad or dotted version of the phrase
107. rst steps II First steps This section is intended to get you up and running with your first sequence and teach you the basics of Octopus operation in the process You are en couraged to use the learned material and experiment further II Connect and power on Connecting MIDI and a sound source Start simply by connecting just one sound source to the MIDI OUT 1 port and then use the provided power cord to connect Octopus to a power outlet Set your sound source to receive on channel 1 and also choose a pitched sound with a medium release time Something like piano may be suitable but don t feel constrained in any way Power on Power on the unit by flipping the power switch If you have connected a USB lamp in the port labeled Lamp you should see it turn on immediately and about two seconds later you should see some of the front panel LEDs turn on The LED labeled PAGE should be blinking orange Congratulations you are now ready to engage on a long and rewarding journey with your Octopus sequencer Upon power on or reset Octopus starts in the state that was last saved to its internal FLASH non volatile memory When you power up the machine for the first time or after a memory refresh the machine is starting up with its factory default values Bypassing memory reload By the same token if you hold the CLR button down while powering up the machine Octopus will not load the FLASH memory contents but w
108. s you may have wondered what de termines the moment of switching from one page to the next To set the page length of a page make sure you are in GRID mode and from there press and hold the button of the page whose length you want to read or modify When pressing the page button notice that the SEL LED in row o will be lit and can be pressed to change colors between red and green Make sure to set it to green The default is a red LED in the first position of row zero This indi cates that the page is playing a full 16 step cycle In order to change that use the row zero buttons and click double click them to achieve the desired result Note that the maximum length of a page can be set up to be 8 cycles or 128 step lengths Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode Note that to create a page length of less than 16 you need to double click the 1 LED to turn it off then single click on the keys 1 to 15 Another way of modifying a page s length is to hold the page while turning the LEN knob in the edit block Simple as that One final remark on page length a value less than 16 a full note cy cle will re trigger the page after every time the page has finished playing its designated length LEN values of 16 positions and higher will not re trigger the page allowing you to create longer evolving structures Navigation Guide 70 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VI Grid mode 71 Page follow
109. s because you have not yet set any steps to play Stop You may now want to stop the sequencer do that by pressing the stop button as labeled Stopping the sequencer will reset the chase light position to zero Pause Once the sequencer is playing you may also pause it by pressing the pause button as labeled The pause button freezes the chase light at the current step To continue from pause to continue you may press pause again or any of the play buttons You may want to play a bit with the transport buttons to get yourself familiar with how they work Master Tempo Before you continue you may want to set a different master tempo for the sequencer Simply turn the MAIN rotary encoder in the top right corner clockwise increase or counter clockwise decrease As you turn the knob you will see funny things happen to the lights of the top left quadrant of the outer circle This part of the panel shows the current master tempo and displays its value Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps Two other things to notice here the LED of the button labeled Tempo is orange this indicates that the encoder is regulating the tempo Navigation Guide 14 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps I5 Interface conventions Number display convention The red dots have to be understood as multiple of tens the green dot represents the value of ones in the number on disp
110. s in order to act as a modulator for other tracks Listeners In order to set a track to be a listener click its EFF mutator to toggle it red Pressing a red EFF button will toggle it orange making the track a listening feeder Listening feeders A listening feeder gets modulated first and then amplifies the incom ing modulation with its own effector feed Navigation Guide IOZ octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics 105 Pressing the EFF button will toggle it off with the track not partici pating in Effector modulation Playing For the Effector to work it is merely the offsets of its Steps that count and it is completely irrelevant whether those steps are generat ing MIDI notes or not However if an effector feeder does contain active steps these will be played regularly as they would independent of the effector Muting If a feeder track is muted it will not have any effect on listener tracks Toggling feeder tracks is a quick way to introduce changes to a track and then to go back to the original sound The Effector at work Designate a feeder track Set step 1 in the feeder track and pitch it up or down Now select a track with an index smaller than the effector feeder this is essential and build a pattern into it involving lots if not all steps Make sure that step 1 is set as part of the pattern and play the pat tern Now make this track listen to the effector by toggling
111. scribed changing the velocity step after step A more elegant way to do it is to use step selections i e first select all the steps you want to accent and then tweak the VEL knob to accent them To do this we first have to switch to Page mode either by pressing PAGE in the MODE block or simply by pressing ESC Step select In Page mode press the SEL key and keeping it pressed ga ar while pressing the button of the first step to be selected Note that only active steps may be selected You will see that both the SEL LED and the selected step SEL will blink green indicating the step select status You may now add active steps to the step selection by simply pressing them or remove them from the selection by pressing them again Turn up their velocity and you should hear the change immediately You can now of course change any of the step attributes the pitch the length and the start anything you would like by simply turning the knobs This method produces a relative change In other words increasing the velocity by 10 will add ro to the current velocity of each selected step It does not force all selected steps to the same absolute value To exit the step selection mode press the SEL button again In this case the step selection is remembered for later recall Alternatively you may exit by pressing the ESC key to return to nor mal operation but here the step selection will not be remembered Step selection m
112. sible as soon as a phrase is selected from the pool for the respective step and represents the time com pression value for the particular step phrase A value of 8 is neutral Values lower than 8 will speedup the playback of the phrase while values greater than 8 will slow down the playback Step MIDI continuous controller MCC The MCC value represents the amount of MIDI CC sent at this particular step position This of course only mcc applies when the track is told to do so More on this in the TRACK view The display uses a decimal representation similar to that used for VEL with the exception that is has a void value indicated by 4 green LEDs in the last positions of the track This means that no value is sent out on that track since o would be a valid value for a MIDI continuous controller Navigation Guide 28 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode 29 Step mutators You may have noticed that the mutator column has several LEDs lit up They are labeled according to the mutator functions that they trigger A lit up mutator indicates that it is available Below a quick description of what they do Step toggle TGL Press the TGL mutator to turn the selected step on and off Step clear CLR Pressing this will recall the preset values for the attributes of the se lected step and will also turn the step off if it was turned on before The default Step attribute values are VEL offset 0
113. st make sure the EDIT LED is orange Now press some buttons in the matrix You will notice that no steps will be set as we have done it before but that the MIDI data of the steps is played out of the MIDI port as it is Grab a step and now tweak its attributes for example pitch to take the most obvious one you will hear that with every click of the en coder the steps is re triggered and played such that you can hear the change in real time The step velocity is shown and editable in the numeric quadrant of the outer circle the pitch in the inner circle The step length may also be adjusted in the matrix by pressing an other button at a distance to denote the length in 1 16th intervals Editing Tracks Pressing the track selectors in preview mode will produce a result similar to the steps buttons The note played will basically reveal the tracks velocity and pitch set tings producing a result equivalent to having a non modified step playing in that track Navigation Guide 56 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode 57 EDIT PERFORM state An alternative and quite rewarding mode of working with a step se quence depending on your style and preference is that of tweaking a set sequence of steps in realtime while the sequence keeps playing You can also do this to some degree without a special mode but EDIT PERFORM takes this to perfection EDIT PERFORM is actually similar to the EDIT state with the ex
114. steps while leaving the other tracks 16 steps each The way to accomplish this is to select the tracks you want to chain and then use the XXVIII button to chain them We will dig into this a bit deeper as we move along Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps Under the hood For now take some time to experiment some more for example change pitch or direction of the tracks You will notice that for now chaining is just a matter of playing indi vidual tracks sequentially in a defined order and does not influence in any way the parameters you have set for the individual tracks However if you are looking to build a continuous structure that spans more than one track you have to ensure that the parameters of the chained tracks match up as needed Details on how to achieve this are described in the corresponding section in the chapter on the Track mode Navigation Guide 22 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps Step real time entry There is a simple way to tap steps into a track in real time Simply grab the track you would like to tap into you will notice that the STEP LED in the MODE block turns red Step tapping While the sequencer is playing tap the STEP key as you go _ and you will see that the steps under the chase light get i toggled on as you tap STEP In fact they are placed into the track at the precise position of Oo the tap within a 1 192 resolution
115. t functionality which you may experience on software packages for example The reason for this is quite simple step sequencers underly a certain granularity constraint that is given by the interface such as the num ber of steps in a track which again give you advantages which other sequencer paradigms do not Therefore on Nemo steps while poly phonic will force certain input into certain start positions which may sound different to your ears than what you have played in In other words if you are looking to input material naturally which you then work and interact with further inside the sequencer you are spot on If you are about to record your piano sonata as a MIDI stream for later identical replay you may not be using the right tool One of the many simple and possibly free software package for MIDI recording may be a better choice than a highly sophisticated hard ware tool Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN MIDI Controller stream recording Generally MIDI controller data is recorded as it is coming in similar to a note stream Arming and disabling tracks for recording works in exactly the same way Once you have set a track for recording your controller movements will be recorded onto the recording track Also the description below applies equally to recording pitch bend and channel pressure data Auto sensing The track s MIDI CC parameters are auto sensing the controller a
116. t per step A value of 5 for example denotes that 5 messages will be sent for this step The first one right on the step the other 4 distributed evenly across the interval of time until the next step is triggered The inter mediate values automatically create a linear slope to the next value Map factors Maps are useful in the sense that we can see and edit a particular step attribute for all steps at once Step attribute scaling There is another advantage we get from maps and that is the easy factoring or scaling of step attribute effect on the play result Using a scaling factor for each map of a track we can now determine to what degree a map is applied to the play data In fact the track attributes LEN and STA themselves are really scal ing factors for the corresponding attribute maps Map factor setting In all cases the middle setting of the scaling factor will play the steps unaffected while tighter settings lower values will reduce the effect of the played map values Looser settings will amplify the effect of a map on the played result The value range for the map factors is numerically between r 17 with 9 being the neutral setting Note that due to the way the display is set up the values for LEN and STA shown in the TRACK mode are de picted as o 16 with 8 being the neutral value Navigation Guide 98 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics 99 Lower than neutral values ha
117. t the same as step recording in other sequencers therefore the slightly different name The idea is simple Once a page is armed for recording you hold down a step button play a note on your keyboard or whatever MIDI controller you re using and voila The step is entered This only re quires the page to be armed for recording Simple Arming a page for recording With no track selected hold down the PAGE button and then press the REC key and you should see the REC LED blink orange You have now armed the page for recording allowing you to perform step note recording and more Step note recording Holding a step on the matrix and playing a key on your keyboard will assign the note data including velocity to the selected step To record more than just one step in a take simply keep playing on your keyboard and you should see the played notes fill in one after another They will default to length r 16 and will simply follow the flow of the respective track Also note that the recording of MIDI data will follow the pattern de scribed in the following Fresh recording If you step note record on a step that is turned off i e you pressed it once on then off again and did not release the button yet the step will be freshly assigned the value of the incoming note Stacked recording Step note recording on a step that is turned on will stack the incom ing pitch on top of the already existing data letting you effectivel
118. target in blinking orange Also the matrix is showing in every row the value respective to the corresponding track for the chosen attribute This type of display is called a MIX map showing the behavior of the tracks with respect to a particular attribute which can be adjusted using the MIX encoder block As a matter of fact clicking on any of the MIX target buttons will open a MIX map view with the respective values showing and ready to edit We will describe this in the next sections in more detail Mix attribute quick assign A very quick way to assign an attribute to the MIXER BLOCK is to select the attribute i e to select GRV press and hold the selector of row 2 while pressing the MIX button Or vice versa hold the MIX button pressed and press the track selector corresponding to the wanted attribute By pressing the MIX button you will notice that the selected attrib ute has been changed the current selected mix attribute is blinking orange in the selector column Navigation Guide 52 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer V Page mode 53 Working with Mix maps While viewing MIX maps you can work with a particular track at tribute value directly for all tracks at once You may tweak the value of any one track or apply some functions to all tracks in the page Clear Clear the MIX map using the CLR button this will reset the MIX map to default values for each track in the page all at once Randomize
119. tave 12 semitones of the base pitch light orange Notes in the second octave up light green and notes in the third octave up light red A note may not be part of the chord at the same time in several oc taves To toggle the notes manually in and out of the chord following toggle sequence applies off orange green red off Playing chords To build a chord on a step proceed as follows j Press and hold down the CHORD button that corre Oo sponds to the size of the chord you will build Assuming you want to build the chord C E G you would hold CHORD down the three note chord button Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VIII Musical tools Next use the octave circle to enter notes B ox into the chord up to a cardinality of seven Entry and display corresponds to 0 the chord ground rules above X E s When you are done entering the chord e o on 2 release the chord button You should see ii that the cardinality of the step chord is o 9 o now indicated by the appropriate chord LED in this case the three note chord v a Me o s Oo Every time the step is played you should hear the chord that you have programmed in To remove the chord from a step simply remove all extra notes from the chord The base pitch will not be removable Steps that are set to play chords will be displayed by a orange dot while in PAGE mode Steps that play only single
120. tch the listening off again Grid set selection Program change messages received on channel ro will trigger grid set selections in the GRID It is equivalent to pressing a grid set selec tion key in the matrix The grid set index will be computed as a modulo function of the in coming program change message For example MIDI program changes o 15 will select grid sets 1 16 respectively A MIDI program change message of 33 will select grid set 2 which is computed as follows 33 16 1 1 1 2 Page toggles Program change messages received on MIDI channels 1 9 will act as toggle signals for pages in the respective banks Let s take an example a program change of 33 on MIDI channel 7 will toggle page 2 of bank 7 If some page other than page 2 was playing in bank 7 page 2 will be activated for play and the previously playing page will be muted Similarly if page 2 was indeed playing it will get turned off and no other page in bank 7 will be playing Navigation Guide 124 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer 125 X MIDIIN Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI General tools XI General tools The following section presents the more infrastructure oriented features and functions 127 Utility functions Chase light align There are many reasons why your chase light in a page may become misaligned in a visual sense Sometimes that s what you want but sometimes not In order to l
121. ted here with the red LEDs count veL ing the tens and the green LED pointing to the ones value This value may be changed in a more conventional fashion by simply turning the VEL knob The step velocity offset may be a positive or negative number Nega tive offsets are shown in the same manner as positive offsets but ad ditionally the 3 LEDs in columns 14 16 are lit green Please note that the total velocity of a step is determined by adding the individual step velocity offset to the base Track velocity This al lows a wide range of velocities in a track while still giving you one place the track velocity to adjust them all up or down and still main tain the relationships set for each step Step pitch PIT As you may expect the PIT row shows the pitch value for the step MT The number displayed is really an offset that the step applies to the track pitch The combined pitch of the track and the step is shown in a musical fashion in the inner circle Turning the PIT knob will now cause the obvious it will change the pitch for the step which you will hear once the step is played Just as for velocity step pitch may be a positive or negative offset relative to the base track pitch Negative offsets are shown in the same manner as positive offsets but additionally the 3 LEDs in col umns 14 16 are lit green Step length LEN The same principles apply to all the other step attribute values in the page except for
122. the chain then the mute opera tion of any chain members will apply to all tracks in that chain Note that it will be a toggle operation so it will invert the mute pattern of the set of chained tracks Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode Track program changes MIDI program change In Track mode you may have noticed that the Program LED is lit in orange and the Select LED next to it is lit in green Also the numeric field is not showing the global tempo value anymore as it does in the PAGE mode We are using that area to edit and send MIDI program changes to the channel of the selected track First select the MIDI channel you would like to send the program change on as the track MIDI channel Next dial in a program number using the rotary encoder on the top right Alternatively you may want to key in the number of the program you want to select Once selected press Program and you should hear see the program change occur Program xit er A couple of side notes are necessary here First consider that not all synthesizer manufacturers use the same numbering scheme for their programs i e some start counting at 1 some at o However the un derlying values are always in the range 0 127 The Octopus convention is to display values in the range 0 128 where a value of o means that no program change message is sent There fore the program changes are numbered in the range 1 128 Sec
123. the data at the time of the copy operation Therefore any changes between the copy and the paste operation are permanent and not recoverable Pasting copied tracks Now grab an empty track as described above by pressing its selector and keeping it pressed You will notice that paste is now available in dicated by the lit PST mutator Press the PST mutator to paste the contents of your source track into the destination Navigation Guide 18 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer II First steps I9 Muting tracks The result of the previous copy and paste operation is that you now have two identical tracks in the same page So all you got is just an annoying double trigger of your pattern audi ble depending on your sound choice Well for now yes unless you put one of the tracks on mute We will now do just that To mute one of the tracks first decide which track you want to mute Now simply press its mutator on the right and see what happens the first press will color the mutator red and the track will not be heard Done the track is muted Pressing the mutator again will simply un mute the track turning the red mutator light off and letting the track play again Recalling mute patterns There is also a way of handling mutes and un mutes very quickly Simply select a mute pattern as you normally would i e mute some of the tracks in the page As you mute tracks in the page mode observe that the MUT butto
124. the display of their values LEN P f Change the length on the step by turning its LEN knob As you increment the value turning the knob clockwise you will see a green dot advancing up to 11 after which the red value will be in cremented Navigation Guide 26 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode 27 Each green increment corresponds to 1 192 of a note and each red value corresponds to 12 192 1 16 of a note The minimum step length is 1 192 Decrementing beyond that point will light the last 4 LEDs green This means that the step is set to le gato mode i e no note off MIDI signal will be played for this step The natural maximum length of a step is one full note 192 192 However Steps have a LEN multiplier allowing them to play up to 8 times their actual length The step LEN multiplier value is in the range 1 8 The step multiplier value is shown and editable in STEP mode in the transport area us ing the pattern used for track clock multipliers The maximum step length is therefore 8 full notes at master clock speed The multiplier can be adjusted manually and is computed automatically when recording notes in a track described in a later section This allows for recording long holding notes to a remarkably large degree Step start STA This row denotes the start of a step By default you will see that the STA line is empty sa Turn the STA knob clockwise and you will see a red bar g
125. the page you want to recall from 9 OPE Or flash first Now press and hold the PAGE button Q Q and press the green blinking ESC button Note that Navigation Guide 132 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools 133 this operation may be performed at playtime i e the sequencer does not have to be stopped for this operation Save progress The progress of the save operation is depicted in the note inner cir cle and operation completion is signaled by a complete circle NOTE If a save operation does not complete the saved memory contents will be irreversibly lost and the previously saved instrument state will likely become corrupted as well Things to remember Some of this is repeating information but it may be a good time to remember it You can always revert back to the last saved state by simply pressing the reset button found on the bottom pane of Octopus just under neath the Tempo knob This will clear all changes made since the last save operation If you power up Octopus while holding the CLR button you will start without loading the saved state from memory starting off with a virtually fresh machine To completely clear the Octopus RAM memory back to the factory default go into GRID mode press and hold GRID and then press the CLR Mutator button This does not affect the machine state saved in FLASH memory in any way Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer XI Generaltools
126. to persons WARNING WHEN USING ELECTRIC PRODUCTS BASIC PRECAUTIONS SHOULD ALWAYS BE FOLLOWED INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING WARNING Octopus is designed to be used in a standard household environment Power requirements for electrical equipment vary from area to area Please ensure that your Octopus meets the power re quirements in your area If in doubt consult a qualified electrician or genoQs Machines 120 VAC 60 Hz for USA and Canada 220 240 VAC Q 50 Hz for Europe 240 VAC 50 Hz for Australia IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS Read these instructions Keep these instructions Heed all warnings Follow all instructions Do not use this apparatus near water Clean only with dry cloth Install in accordance with the manufacture s instructions Do not install near any heat sources such as radiators heat register stoves or other apparatus including amplifiers that produce heat Do not defeat the safety purpose of the polarized or grounding type plug A polarized plug has two blades with one wider than the other A grounding type plug has two blades and a third grounding prong The wide blade or the third prong are provided for your safety If the provided plug does not fit into your outlet consult an electrician for replacement of the obsolete outlet 10 Protect the power cord from being walked on or pinched particularly at plugs convenience receptacles and the point where they exit from the apparatus 11 Only use att
127. top key to disable track record selection for all tracks in all pages This basically allows for record re channelling the next time a track is armed for recording Recording chords A track will stack the note data input such that you can make up chords by simply playing one note on top of another Of course you will need to be good on timing with this one Playing chords directly on your keyboard will also generate a chord on the Octopus step un der the chase light making it very easy When stacking notes up to make up a chord you will notice that the length velocity and start value of the step will use the values of the last played note for all notes in the chord Note that chord recording is subject to the same restrictions that ap ply to building chords into steps a chord cannot span more than three octaves Disable recording To disable recording for the track in question simply press the blink ing REC button to return to rehearse mode From there press REC again to return to normal operation Navigation Guide 114 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN II Reflections on MIDI recording While MIDI recording is one of the most exciting and useful features in Nemo some restrictions do apply as we have seen already The MIDI recording capability of Nemo and Octopus while exten sive and clearly unmatched in hardware step sequencers should not be viewed as what goes in necessarily will come ou
128. top right rotary encoder will simply reboot your machine by default resetting it to the last saved state MIDI connectors Octopus features two MIDI ports and each port has its own IN and OUT connector as found on the back side of the machine They are labeled accordingly with MIDI 1 and MIDI 2 Lamp connector The lamp connector on the back of the machine is designed to oper ate with any USB powered lamp as are often used with laptop com puters Connect your preferred USB lamp to use Octopus in envi ronments that demand it or if like us you just simply like the effect 1 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance USB connector The USB connector on the back of Octopus does currently not carry and function related to musical applications and should be seen as something you should be only concerned with if you are interested in development or change of the Octopus software Navigation Guide 2 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance The Octopus world In brief the Octopus world consists of entities or objects attributes that are associated with them and functions that modify those objects or their attributes This model allows for modifications of the objects in the most flexi ble manner and all in real time with the sequencer running It is all done using an admittedly intimidating but reportedly highly intuitive and accessible user interface The Oc
129. topus can save the full instrument state for later recall all settings are stored to FLASH memory and automatically recalled upon power on Note that only one state may be saved to FLASH replacing any pre viously saved machine state Also note that in order to perform this operation the sequencer has to be stopped WARNING Please make sure that Octopus is not turned off or reset during the save operation Saving the machine state To perform a save of the machine state go to GRID Mode and press and hold the GRID button While you hold down the GRID key the Program LED will start to flash GRID x Program Pressing the Program key will start the save opera Q tion Expect the save operation to take about 5 10 seconds Saving individual pages Occasionally it may be useful to save individual pages Program only as opposed to the full instrument state For this to work the machine has to be stopped and you have to be in GRID mode While in GRID mode make sure that the EDIT LED is lit up or ange otherwise press it once to make it light orange Now press and hold the matrix button corresponding to the page you are about to save This will reveal a red blinking Program button among others While holding the matrix button pressed click on the red blinking Program button to save the respective page to memory Loading individual pages from flash To recall an individual page from flash memory go to PAGE mode of
130. topus object model The master Octopus object is the GRID which contains PAGES each of them containing TRACKS which are made up of STEPS Each object is associated with attributes and functions that can be operated upon The diagram depicts at a high level the Octopus hier archy of objects and their related attributes 3 Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer I Octopus at a glance Navigation basics The Grid contains all Page objects and each Page is made up of Tracks and Steps Moving around this hierarchy tree is trivial to jump between leaves you can always go up a level and down again Additionally in most situations direct paths are also provided allow ing you to jump directly from one leaf to another Just as an example assuming you are in the GRID mode you would hold the PAGE button and select the page you would like to jump into by pressing its button Or you would double click on the corre sponding page button You would do the same to get further down into a specific track and from there into a specific step You may also choose to go from a page into a step directly as we will see later Navigating back up the tree is only one click away and will take you directly to the selected level Or simply use the ESC key to always get to the PAGE level of your current page arriving at a known starting point Similarly in Track mode press TRACK and the selector correspond ing to the track you
131. trollers Navigation Guide 122 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN 123 External scale editing In the chapter on scales we have explained how to build and modify a scale We have used the Octopus pitch circle to select the notes of the scale or the base bitch of the scale accordingly However you may do the same changes using MIDI notes on the Oc topus MIDI in port These could be generated by a MIDI keyboard for example or even another sequencer or the other Octopus MIDI port Arming external scale edit To do that arm the page for recording hold PAGE and press REC then simply enter scale mode by pressing SCALE SEL All notes received on the MIDI IN will be interpreted in the same way that key presses in the pitch circle will be interpreted Disabling external scale edit Press the REC button again to disable this mode Or simply disable the scale by pressing SCALE SEL again Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN External program change Octopus allows external control of page toggle states via program change messages The program change messages received will be in terpreted according to the channel they arrive on The MIDI port however does not matter Arming program change listening To activate program change listening you need to go to grid mode hold the GRID key pressed and then click the REC key You will see the REC LED blink orange Pressing REC once again will swi
132. utators When a step selection is active you will notice that some mutators become active indicated by their lit up LEDs The set may be dif ferent depending on whether you have one or more steps selected Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer III Step mode Single step selection If a single step is selected using the SEL button you may notice that the circles are showing the step s velocity and pitch values This is useful as a reference when you edit the steps velocity and pitch Navigation Guide 32 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IV Track mode IV Irack mode Track mode is the level at which you can inspect and tweak directly track pa rameters the Matrix field is dedicated to information about just one track 33 Basic operation The TRACK mode provides similar functionality to the STEP mode for any track and its attributes Please note that all the functionality described in the TRACK mode is also reachable from the PAGE mode as long as a track is selected The difference is that TRACK mode provides the finer visual feed back necessary for some of the edit features Zooming in Entering TRACK mode i e zooming into a track from PAGE mode is easy and predictable by now decide which track you want to zoom into and double click its selector button In our example by double clicking selector number 5 we would zoom into Track number 5 You can get back to PAGE mode by pressing ESC or PAGE
133. ve a reducing effect higher than neutral values have an amplifying effect The neutral value is displayed as a orange 1 reducing values shown using a green bar and amplifying values shown using a red bar Working with map factors In order to view the scaling factor of a particular map go to track mode and press and hold the corresponding attribute selector The numeric quadrant in the outer circle will display the scaling factor An orange dot at the 1 position indicates the middle setting Turning the main rotary will either render a red bar up or a green bar down depending on the turn direction Note that the map factors may also be accessed directly from the MAP mode Use the main rotary encoder to modify the respective value Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer IX Advanced topics Step events Steps may be used to generate so called events Events are simply automated changes that happen at runtime In general terms an event is a programmed change of the attributes of a track and is at tached to a step All track attributes may be modulated by events The finer definition is however that for the DIR POS and MCH events the track attribute value changes while in the case of the other attributes VEL PIT LEN STA AMT GRV and MCC what changes is really the attribute map factor Please refer to the section on attribute maps for details Creating events To create an event double click
134. ve situations Leaving Grid Track mode In order to exit the GRID TRACK mode press either the GRID or the TRACK button Both of them will simply take you back to GRID mode Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VII Performance tools Navigation Guide 82 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VIII Musical tools VIII Musical tools The section provides descriptions for tools that are of value on the musical side 83 things such as chords and scales Step chords Steps may play more than one pitch at a time effectively forming chords Chords can be directly programmed in or directly recorded from a MIDI keyboard see the section on MIDI IN Recording into a step The next section will assume we are working in STEP mode To fol low along please make sure to enter STEP mode before we move on To set the stage while in STEP mode notice the CHORD button block at the bottom right of the front panel By default the single note chord button should be lit orange Chord ground rules Step chords are formed of up to 7 notes which may range over up to three octaves The chord is made up of the step pitch as the base and additional notes that are stacked on top and which are always higher than the base pitch This means of course that changing the PIT offset of the step will also transpose the chord The chord display should be read as follows the base pitch of the step blinks orange Notes within one oc
135. y create chords Chord recording Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN You may record chords directly in the same manner as simple notes You can record chords stacking on top of what s there already or starting from scratch Track live transposition Finally if a track is selected while a page is armed for recording a track selection may also be locked in using the SEL button you will dynamically and directly change the pitch assignment for that par ticular track effectively transposing it a playtime With only one track selected and holding the track selector pressed you may observe the change in pitch assignment directly in the pitch circle Navigation Guide n8 octopus MIDI Control Sequencer X MIDI IN 119 Advanced recording There are some more details to recording that need special considera tion Some of them may have already come natural to you so you may find them again documented below Chained track recording At any time only one track will be recorded into and that will be the recording armed track of the current page In order to record takes that are longer than 16 steps simply build a track chain and enable one of the chain tracks for recording Chained page recording In complement to the above you may record takes longer than 160 steps too by using the page clustering function Simply cluster the necessary number of pages set their track ch
136. y is built up starting at row o with the pattern of the track under consideration Here you may toggle select and skip steps as you would in PAGE mode as already described in the introductory section also holding them and tweaking their parameters will work but leave that for a moment to avoid confusion If the sequencer is playing you also see a red chase light in the row of the track currently being worked on Reading attribute maps You may think of the area made up by rows 1 9 as divided into 16 col umns one for each step represented in row o For each step the column will display a bar corresponding to the value of the attribute whose map we are seeing Remember that this is the attribute value of the steps before the steps are affected by any sort of track offset Representation For values that can be negative or positive VEL PIT STA a zero value is represented by a line of LEDs on row 5 Positive values are above the line and negative values are below Now press any button in row 6 as an example You will see that the bar for the step in the column of your press will jump to the position of the button you have pressed Reading the real values The real value of the step attribute offsets can be read out easily by holding the respective step pressed in row o For this purpose you may also want to temporarily use the preview mode toggle the EDIT LED to red such as to not affect the toggle state
137. ze the note pool is made up by the chord notes plus a number of rests empty notes The number of rests is given by the difference between the polyph ony and the chord size Example Chord is C E G therefore chord size is 3 A polyphony of 3 will consistently play the chord C E G A polyphony of 2 will play two elements picked at random from the pool C E G A polyphony of 5 will play 3 elements picked at random from the pool C E G rest rest Strumming chords To strum a chord zoom into the step containing the chord hold any of the chord buttons pressed and turn the main o rotary clockwise You will be able to set a strum level be tween o and 9 shown as green values This also means that the chord will be strummed up 3 Turning the main rotary counterclockwise will show the red values 9 to o which are indicating that you are now strumming the chord down O o o Octopus comes with a preset strum configuration which affects the note start values The strum effect increases exponentially with the strum level chosen Navigation Guide octopus MIDI Control Sequencer VIII Musical tools Step phrases Step phrases are a tool to quickly and greatly enrich a step A step phrase is a group of notes that are triggered as an avalanche by a step based on the pitch of that step Assigning a phrase to a step is very simple from Page mode double click the step to enter Step mode select GR

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