Octave HS-1

[metropolis_4]

Maybe it's sweet spot is for live performances. MIDI + AI+ Laptop doesnt make for a great live rig, IMO...

I don’t know, IMO this thing looks atrocious for live performances.

And I’ve played many gigs with a laptop + AI + MIDI controllers.

 

[Byrdman]

I don’t know, IMO this thing looks atrocious for live performances.

And I’ve played many gigs with a laptop + AI + MIDI controllers.

I dont know if it fits the bill or not, and I know you have played in many more live settings than I have, but one piece of gear is better than 3 pieces, IMO.

 

[metropolis_4]

I dont know if it fits the bill or not, and I know you have played in many more live settings than I have, but one piece of gear is better than 3 pieces, IMO.

For me personally I prefer having 3 pieces because

1. I can choose my favorite that I prefer for each piece instead of being stuck with what’s in the box
2. If everything is in one piece of gear and it goes down then everything goes down and it’s much more expensive to replace. With several pieces of one of them goes down I can more easily get by with the rest and it’s less expensive to replace one part. And I lose less of my setup so it’s much faster and easier to get back up and running again. It’s also cheaper and easier to have a backup available for the critical parts
3. I can swap out any of the parts if I find something that works better without having to change the whole thing

 

[dws2384]

Maybe it's sweet spot is for live performances. MIDI + AI+ Laptop doesnt make for a great live rig, IMO...

Pretty much every live gig has a laptop (or multiple the larger they get) running on it for something these days. Tracks, click, lighting, midi, etc.

Keys guys have been using them for like 30 years with plugins and hosts.

Electronic music acts do entire shows with nothing but a laptop. Bieber just headlined Coachella with a macbook

The whole world runs on computers daily but somehow guitarists cant make one work for a 2 hour set...

 

[Mac Jones]

Windows 11 modified? Well, good luck with that.

It seems to me that simply making a cheap homemade laptop or tablet stand with an audio interface built in, just to tidy things up, would result in the same thing. Granted, I hate dongles and stuff hanging off, and cables getting in the way, so I get this.

Having said all that, I haven't used this, so who knows?

 

[deadpool_25]

So interesting how this market works. For years I’ve read people saying it would be awesome to have something along these lines (a floor modeler that runs plugins) and then someone makes it and it gets a bunch of negativity.

And the developer is in here and instead of curiosity and at-least-semi-respectful-questions it’s a lot of “meh this seems silly.” Whatever, just seems kinda weird to me.

Anyway, it does seem like an interesting concept to me. I like the idea of being able to run a full production-style signal chain. Like applying Pro-Q, Saturn, Pro-L, Soothe, etc. alnongside your favorite guitar plugins and such.

Also, this just occurred to me, could you also run a track in your DAW as a backing track? I’m envisioning being able to load up a drum groove, build a little bass pattern and jam along to a cool and quick backing track. Maybe toss a little Serum pad in the background. That might be fun.

Anyway, interesting idea and project @sophocha

 

[deadpool_25]

So could you load up something like a NDSP plugin, a GGD drum library, and a Submission Audio bass library? Mixing/mastering chains?

 

[laxu]

So interesting how this market works. For years I’ve read people saying it would be awesome to have something along these lines (a floor modeler that runs plugins) and then someone makes it and it gets a bunch of negativity.

And the developer is in here and instead of curiosity and at-least-semi-respectful-questions it’s a lot of “meh this seems silly.” Whatever, just seems kinda weird to me.

The way I see it, these products are neither here nor there. It doesn't offer much compared to bringing a laptop and audio interface, you still need something for footswitching. Tech specs also make no mention about latency, just says it's 24-bt/196 KHz which doesn't mean much if the latency is high.

The touchscreen doesn't really help because none of these VST plugins are designed for touchscreens. You will be more likely to be frustrated because your big fat finger can't hit that all-too-tiny button in a plugin without scaling options.

I think many people like them at an idea level but haven't considered what it means to have an OS, applications and plugins, none of which are designed for touchscreens.

 

[Orvillain]

So interesting how this market works. For years I’ve read people saying it would be awesome to have something along these lines (a floor modeler that runs plugins) and then someone makes it and it gets a bunch of negativity.

And the developer is in here and instead of curiosity and at-least-semi-respectful-questions it’s a lot of “meh this seems silly.” Whatever, just seems kinda weird to me.

Anyway, it does seem like an interesting concept to me. I like the idea of being able to run a full production-style signal chain. Like applying Pro-Q, Saturn, Pro-L, Soothe, etc. alnongside your favorite guitar plugins and such.

Also, this just occurred to me, could you also run a track in your DAW as a backing track? I’m envisioning being able to load up a drum groove, build a little bass pattern and jam along to a cool and quick backing track. Maybe toss a little Serum pad in the background. That might be fun.

Anyway, interesting idea and project @sophocha

An off the shelf processor, with an off the shelf touch screen, with an off the shelf audio interface, probably with off the shelf Thesycon drivers, and then all of the software DSP offloaded to other developers.

... yeah sure, sign me up.

 

[dws2384]

So interesting how this market works. For years I’ve read people saying it would be awesome to have something along these lines (a floor modeler that runs plugins) and then someone makes it and it gets a bunch of negativity.

And the developer is in here and instead of curiosity and at-least-semi-respectful-questions it’s a lot of “meh this seems silly.” Whatever, just seems kinda weird to me.

Anyway, it does seem like an interesting concept to me. I like the idea of being able to run a full production-style signal chain. Like applying Pro-Q, Saturn, Pro-L, Soothe, etc. alnongside your favorite guitar plugins and such.

Also, this just occurred to me, could you also run a track in your DAW as a backing track? I’m envisioning being able to load up a drum groove, build a little bass pattern and jam along to a cool and quick backing track. Maybe toss a little Serum pad in the background. That might be fun.

Anyway, interesting idea and project @sophocha

I don’t think any of the criticism is hateful just for hate sake. Most of the points have been valid. Everything you listed you could do you have been able to do with a laptop, AI and midi controller for years.

When monitoring through plugins, which you’d have to do here, most cheap interfaces have pretty high RTL. I’d like to see the specs on that mentioned. If youre going to start with a baseline latency of 6-8ms and then stack a bunch of plugins on top it’s going to get high pretty fast.

 

[ian_dissonance]

So interesting how this market works. For years I’ve read people saying it would be awesome to have something along these lines (a floor modeler that runs plugins) and then someone makes it and it gets a bunch of negativity.

And the developer is in here and instead of curiosity and at-least-semi-respectful-questions it’s a lot of “meh this seems silly.” Whatever, just seems kinda weird to me.

Anyway, it does seem like an interesting concept to me. I like the idea of being able to run a full production-style signal chain. Like applying Pro-Q, Saturn, Pro-L, Soothe, etc. alnongside your favorite guitar plugins and such.

Also, this just occurred to me, could you also run a track in your DAW as a backing track? I’m envisioning being able to load up a drum groove, build a little bass pattern and jam along to a cool and quick backing track. Maybe toss a little Serum pad in the background. That might be fun.

Anyway, interesting idea and project @sophocha

I think it’s an interesting approach. For the utility of something like this drops dramatically since I’d need a separate interface to get enough outputs to make it worth it. The IDEA of running all those plugins is cool, but a lot of high quality mixing plugins are not capable of running at low enough latency even on a much beefier machine. The computer spec part matches up with pretty low-level consumer laptops. The interface is a wildcard. There are only two outputs so anything with tracks would need to either be mixed ITB and sent to FOH or split to mono. VERY cool idea, IMO, just some gaps that don’t make sense to me personally.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

but a lot of high quality mixing plugins are not capable of running at low enough latency even on a much beefier machine

out of interest, what kind of plugin chains would give you issues? If you stack up a load of linear phase EQ’s and multiband plugins with linear phase crossovers, and maybe go mental with oversampling, sure.

But that’s not really comparable to HW modellers which would be avoiding processes that add latency. Most guitar chains are going to add imperceptible amounts of latency (drives, amps, cabs, delays, reverbs etc).

 

[ian_dissonance]

out of interest, what kind of plugin chains would give you issues? If you stack up a load of linear phase EQ’s and multiband plugins with linear phase crossovers, and maybe go mental with oversampling, sure.

But that’s not really comparable to HW modellers which would be avoiding processes that add latency. Most guitar chains are going to add imperceptible amounts of latency (drives, amps, cabs, delays, reverbs etc).

He was talking about stuff like soothe and proq in the post I quoted. I agree just a guitar chain probably isn’t going to be an issue (even on what is basically a Celeron processor). And if you stick to basic utility plugins, probably not an issue, but if you wanted to run a whole Neutron channel strip or some Ozone pieces or something you might no longer be in comfortable latency ranges.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

He was talking about stuff like soothe and proq in the post I quoted. I agree just a guitar chain probably isn’t going to be an issue (even on what is basically a Celeron processor). And if you stick to basic utility plugins, probably not an issue, but if you wanted to run a whole Neutron channel strip or some Ozone pieces or something you might no longer be in comfortable latency ranges.

Kind of moot talking about using processes that need latency to exist in the first place, it’s a limitation of the type of processing rather than the platform itself adding latency.

Or put another way, latency wouldn’t be any more of a problem unless someone purposely causes it.

 

[ian_dissonance]

Kind of moot talking about using processes that need latency to exist in the first place, it’s a limitation of the type of processing rather than the platform itself adding latency.

Or put another way, latency wouldn’t be any more of a problem unless someone purposely causes it.

No argument there. Point being just because it’s a DAW doesn’t make everything available functional live.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

No argument there. Point being just because it’s a DAW doesn’t make everything available functional live.

Absolutely. I think there generally tends to be an implication with computer based recording that latency is higher than within a HW modeller. There’s no need for latency to be an issue, but I guess if people want to run latency inducing plugins (maybe there’s a situation like reamping where it wouldn’t matter) then there’s the option to do so

 

[deadpool_25]

The way I see it, these products are neither here nor there. It doesn't offer much compared to bringing a laptop and audio interface,

I think the point is to put all that in one box?

you still need something for footswitching.

Apparently it does come with a little midi footswitch.

Tech specs also make no mention about latency, just says it's 24-bt/196 KHz which doesn't mean much if the latency is high.

Yeah it’ll be interesting to see how the latency will be when using third party plugins vs the internal (?) sounds from TH-U. And then it’ll be interesting to see just how crazy you might be able to get with additional plugins. As the other guys have stated, maybe some of the stuff I mentioned would be too latency-inducing—I’d be curious to see just what could be done without introducing too much though. Still, even just being able to run any third party guitar plugin seems pretty cool.

The touchscreen doesn't really help because none of these VST plugins are designed for touchscreens. You will be more likely to be frustrated because your big fat finger can't hit that all-too-tiny button in a plugin without scaling options. I think many people like them at an idea level but haven't considered what it means to have an OS, applications and plugins, none of which are designed for touchscreens.

Perhaps. That seems like speculation though. I can accept that’s it’s an educated guess but I’m not sure that’s how you’d be building tones? I saw a video where a mouse pointer was moving around the screen so I’d guess you could use a mouse to build tones and the foot switch to select those tones.

I think. It would be cool to check one out. I think @sophocha should send one to @MirrorProfiles for some in depth testing and review/feedback :)

 

[dws2384]

Absolutely. I think there generally tends to be an implication with computer based recording that latency is higher than within a HW modeller. There’s no need for latency to be an issue, but I guess if people want to run latency inducing plugins (maybe there’s a situation like reamping where it wouldn’t matter) then there’s the option to do so

Except many of the guitar plugins do. All of the strymon ones have additional latency, most of the UA ones do, Eventide all do, Soundtoys. So if youre going to build out a chain with an amp and a bunch of mix and match effects its going to add up quickly. Valhalla and NAM dont (if you use the native nam loader an not one with oversampling like Genome) which is what I generally use. I can get close to hardware modeller with an RME interface and those plugins but its still not as easy as you think and you wouldnt get anywhere close with a cheap interface and a random assortment of plugins chained together.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

Except many of the guitar plugins do. All of the strymon ones have additional latency, most of the UA ones do, Eventide all do, Soundtoys. So if youre going to build out a chain with an amp and a bunch of mix and match effects its going to add up quickly. Valhalla and NAM dont (if you use the native nam loader an not one with oversampling like Genome) which is what I generally use. I can get close to hardware modeller with an RME interface and those plugins but its still not as easy as you think and you wouldnt get anywhere close with a cheap interface and a random assortment of plugins chained together.

I use all these plugins regularly for recording guitars with clients. I don’t even have my buffer set THAT low and latency is never an issue.

The latency issues people come up with are always hypothetical what ifs that involve something else that adds a ton of latency. And whenever it’s at that point of latency being so critical, you’d build a rig with that in mind and make the compromises accordingly.

 

[paisleywookiee]

I'd rather run:

1. MacBook Air M5 - $950
2. UA Volt 2 - $199
3. Luminite Graviton M2 - $240

$1389. Run it with Mainstage, and it's a solid setup, and unlike the Octave (allegedly, according to the video) will do 16 samples for buffer without issue. Yes, everything's separate. But there's just no way I'm running Windows 11, especially for live stuff.