I don’t see it the way you see it. I bought the op-1f knowing what it can and can’t do. From my point of view, any other firmware update goodies TE has planned for it are welcome additions, of course. I’m sure they’re going to continue supporting it, but I think it’s better to see things for what they are and not what I wish them to be.
They way you framed it (“Hide and seek is not respect to the users”) does baffle me a bit, though. You feel disrespected because TE do not communicate what else they’ve got planned for future firmware updates? Do other music tech companies offer a development schedule? From what I know, the way TE supports their products is not unlike what other companies like Elektron are doing. If you’ve got any feature requests or cool ideas for the op-1f, just send TE an email, you don’t have to wait for them to run a survey.
I’ve just picked up a OP1 field-I’m a new OP1 user as I never had the OG. It’s bit of an impulsive purchase as I saw a deal online for £1250 and thought I’d have a go as they are selling used for that or more so I shouldn’t lose out.
I’ve been using the MPC one and SP404mk2 for a little while, but recently I’ve been using those in conjunction with the RC505mk2 looper and live looping everything rather than sequencing it and really enjoying that approach, committing to audio.
I figured the tape work flow of the OP1f might give me a similar thing.
Initial impressions are interesting. It looks and feels great; really nicely put together and very tactile. Sounds seem really good, I’m really enjoying the sound of the synths and the speed with which you can access good sounds. Workflow-I like the tape approach but still finding it fiddly and struggling to get beat based ideas going. It doesn’t have the syncing that the RC505 has (or the big obvious pads) so it’s taking me some time to get tight loops going. It seems great for more freeform ambient stuff, but not quite as good (probably my skills) for beat based stuff for me at present.
The kicker may well be the price. It’s my most expensive bit of kit by a long way, and not sure it is going to do enough to justify it. It’s over twice the price of my MPC, I really like the idea of it for travelling, but I don’t do that a bunch and the SP404mk2 can also work for that, the synths are great but are they really better than something like the mini freak I could get for £500? The workflow is cool and inspiring, but actually I could pick up a Octatrack for the same price… I want to love this thing, but I’m not there yet and not sure I will be. We’ll see.
To other more experienced OP1 users-what’s your main use case for the synth. Standalone or part of a wider set up? Any tips and tricks that were eureka moments for you when you first started?
Assume never. If it happens, it’s a bonus. You are stressing yourself out over something you have no control over. Or that’s the way I look at it. Life’s too short.
TE won’t commit either way, and I think that is fair. If they say they will do it, people will ask weekly “when?”. Also, they might run into difficulty when they attempt it, and then having to say “sorry, we couldn’t do it” will be used by people as proof that they are clueless.
If they say they will never do it, but change their mind at some point in the future, some people will complain “I sold mine for a loss because you said this will never happen. TE can’t be trusted, etc.”.
Companies can’t really win in situations like these. Although it would be nice if they told the truth and deal with any fallout later, it is usually just the safest to say “we don’t know, maybe”.
yeah thats a good point. i think we all feel to some degree that this ingenious little device needs to be perfect but its unreasonable and we dont hold most other devices to this standard. the advice i gave to myself (lol) a year or so ago was something akin to “stfu and use the damn thing and make some music and enjoy your forking life”
I’d say start by using it standalone and see how far you can go with it. The op-1f is a jack of all trades and some might say a master of none. I think it’s a prime example of the saying “it’s more than the sum of its parts”. It can replace lots of other things, but it’s not going to offer the same functionality of more dedicated instruments. It’s a synthesizer, a sampler, a drum machine, a vocoder, a tape recorder, an FX box, a midi controller, a microphone, a bunch of weird sequencers, a radio, a sound interface, etc.
If you can get over its limitations, approach it with an open mind, and above all, try to have fun making music, you’re going to have a blast. It can lead you to places you wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.
Same here.
Sold the op1f and got back to the DAW.
Waiting for the new 12.9 iPad Air to fully replace the op1f as a portable DAW.
Ultimately, the limitations got in the way of my creative momentums.
And being a songwriter for the past 20 years, I felt inspired at first but frustrated in the end.
Even an undo function wouldn’t have saved it for me. but that’s just me.
I got a lot of tracks out of it, but it never proved worthy of my personal endeavors.
Still a great machine.
One that got me writing for fun again. But one I would have loved back in 1998 when I was 15. One I couldn’t deal with in the limitless DAW world we have today.
I must thank you, djcuvcuv. You’ve truly helped me reassess my view of the OP1f. As a consumer, I’ve never bought a piano/guitar/bass, etc and asked, “where the fuck are my software updates?!” I’ve become pretty bratty with electronic instruments.
It’s awesome when you get something that can do more after you bought it, but that’s not always the case. Should be more grateful for software updates from every company. If the hardware is faulty, that’s another thing. I would return a stringed instrument if the neck was warped out of the case.
With the OP1f, I highly doubt TE makes any money off it with the margins. Might be hard to justify spending $ on its software development, sadly. Hopefully the KO II becomes a huge hit and subsidizes other parts of the business. Firmware updates on it, however, would be greatly appreciated.
If the OP1f doesn’t work for you, sell it and get something that does. Although I got mine used, it still stings a bit. It’s really expensive and there are so many affordable choices out there now. So grateful there are actually pretty civil forums like this to help us make informed buying decisions.
thanks for your very kind words. im glad i could share any help to you and anyone here. ive gotten tons of help reading all the great posts from the rest of you. learned a ton here on this forum.
i agree, its really special to get a product that really is hardware based and fully formed that can nevertheless evolve with the user-base in a pretty significant way. i definitely have some minor/mild tendencies on the OCD side (in life in general) it took some breaths to realize i was obsessing a bit too much with buttons and not making enough music each day.
baby steps!
(my latest “creation” on the op1f + acoustic guitar)
I don’t get these absolutes where it’s either all in DAW or all Dawless.
For me, the beauty is in the middle. Even though I make 90% of my music in Ableton, which I absolutely love, I still have a lot of gear that brings me immense satisfaction in my life but for other reasons.
I’m never selling my OP-1 field unless I absolutely have to! And I don’t even use it that frequently but I just appreciate how beautiful it is, how well it works with what it has, I appreciate the limitations it has. When I pick it up, I play few notes, twist few knobs, I’m happy.
You can work both in DAW and enjoy using gear at the same time.
Either way, have fun, make music!
Although I totally subscribe to your point of view, I’d respectfully would like to add a middle point of sorts.
The op1f is a great piece of kit that can totally live in between the full ITB paradigm and the DAWless universe. And for a moment there, I almost thought that was it. I really thought I found the missing piece of my setup.
But I ended up selling mine because of a rational thinking that goes like this :
The op1f’s input/output are way too fiddly to be plugged/unplugged that many times (mini-jacks, number of ports, etc). And it still is limited in terms of routing (I bought a fair share of dongle in order to be able to use the op1f as a jack of all trades : audio interface/MIDI controller/sketchpad/external mic/hardware synth) when you want to center an experience around it.
It is doable and fairly easy. And yet, it feels botched down a bit (the charging battery option is a weird one that introduces way too many ground loop, the mini-jacks are less than ideal, the MIDI controller portion is a bit annoying to access, the output section is laughable, etc) and ultimately kills the vibe when trying to keep the creative momentum alive.
At that point, at least for me, this is balanced out by its price. It’s a lot of money to ask. Not even comparing it to anything else. It just is a lot of money.
It represents, at least for me, a full month worth of gigs and jobs.
And it’s a beautiful designer’s kit, it’s usable af, it’s quirky but lovable, it’s an impressive collection of many useful features in a neat package…it is a beauty of its own.
And yet, I wouldn’t take it on the road with me, let alone gig with it (never understood that Field moniker…that’s where the mini-jacks come into play, the gap in between the keys are not great for long term durability, etc), it has a weird way of doing just about anything (to the point where some limitations feel unintuitive and some options just unusable), etc.
For some of us, I’d say it’s way too many money for a way too limited set of features that TE tried to balance the best they could.
And there is place for everyone here, I truly believe.
This kind of back and forth is priceless for anyone on the fence of buying one out.
It will work for some. Won’t for others.
Its price is divisive, its workflow is polarizing.
I don’t think the « sell it or keep it » answer has any density here. TE wanted this to be polarizing from the start. I still remember the Superbooth videos when they announced the price. It’s all there. TE knows how to market a device.
And for such a piece of kit, ain’t no better way of making yourself an opinion than buying it and trying it for a few months.
I personally gelled with it. Inspired me, got me into fun-writing again.
But at the same time, the money I made by reselling it went into my business.
I’ll probably miss it a bit. But it’s a no brainer for me to invest into my music school endeavors rather than in my couch-fun-writing passion that I can get by with an iPad I already own.
All I’m saying is there is a place for everyone in this never ending debate.
And I find your analysis to be on point and very true : it is not said enough how one could see the op1f as a middle man between ITB and DAWless. There would be trade offs, but it still is the most complete, portable digital all-in-one package in the market right now.
Cheers!
Fair point and I totally understand everything you said! If the money is needed somewhere else, then it’s a rational thing to sell it. 
But it’s also interesting to see that you gelled with it and you might miss it. It will be funny if you end up buying it again in the future haha!
I doubt it.
It’s just not for me. I got used to the immediacy of the ITB options. And my job as an audio engineer got me in love with the « mixing through hardware » portion.
I see the op1f as the one piece that got me back to writing song for fun, for me. It made me realize that I needed to rethink my ITB workflow and look for that immediacy.
So now, I basically use Logic Pro for iPad as an endless tape recorder through any audio interface I have laying around (be it the Tula Mic, the SP404, the EVO4, etc).
But if TE eventually gets a 2.0 op1 right, count me in for sure. That would mean bigger, sturdier, pricier. So not sure that’s the way they’ll go. But I’m watching.
Here lies the op1f real strength : polarization. You can gel with it and still resell it with next to no regret.
It’s a thing of its own
One thing with the OP-1 : It’s better to have some skills to get the best of it.
There’s not so much automation.
For me, it largely gets used as a poly-synth and creative sampler on its own, in real-time, via effects. That can change, but it’s been that way for ages, both with the OG and OP1F.
When not sampling, the majority of the time I am using @rephazer’s delightful soundpacks for poly-synth stuff. Can’t recommend them enough.
Just watch a few RMR YouTube’s, it’s easy 
You can slow down the tape speed and get more than 6 minutes out of it if you wanted. Supposedly it affects the audio quality (at least that’s what the manual said about the original).You can lower the tape speed down to 25% speed so that should give you 24 minutes of recording time with the caveat that the audio recording quality is supposed to degrade a little bit. I’ve done some testing with it and on the Field in Studio tape mode I don’t notice a difference. And of course if you directly exported the audio to your DAW you’d have to pitch it down for it to sound right again, that might be where the audio degradation would be more noticeable.
Yeup. Tried it and didn’t gel with that.
More importantly, the way the Tape Speed worked always frustrated me.
The fact that you need to commit each track in an album to get the Tape Speed setting embedded in baffled me.
Still. I think I wanted the op1f to be more then it will ever be.
And gotta say, the Merge/Drop feature did not fit my workflow at all. And the time spent de-clicking almost everything I made into the op1f was worth being spent somewhere else. In retrospect, the Merge/Drop feature in and the crossfade tool still not a thing added to some sort of missing QoL for my needs.
It’s funny, I’m coming from the OP-1 before the Field and had that for almost the entirety of the ride before the Field came out and the Field has such massive quality of life upgrades from then. Remembering that the original only has one tape and I’d have to make multiple beats within a single 6 minute tape rather than having 10. I’d record my beats and if I’d change tempos I’d make a little voice memo at the end of a beat that said what the BPM was so I’d remember. Often on vacations I’d record little beats with maybe an A and a B section, maybe taking up 8 bars total, and that was it and I’d end up filling the tape up, coming home and splitting the stems out and cutting up the bits and getting them properly looping in ableton and saving all the individual files.
I still find myself working that way out of habit. Feeling like I hit the wall with either what I want to do or what I can do with the OP-1 and then just scrolling along the tape and starting a new beat, despite having 9 blank tapes I can start on.
But yeah, the OP-1F isn’t an MPC or an Elektron or anything else that thinks in MIDI. It is what is and while limited in lots of ways it still brings a lot to the table that literally no one else is doing. People tend to often bump their head up against it because they want to use it as a portable recording studio… and while it certainly can be, it doesn’t have to be. And the tape doesn’t have to just be a recorder as it is also an instrument within the OP-1 and another tool for sound design.
I guess it’s all about perspective. I remember what the OP-1 was like at the beginning. Finger sequencer and Nitro Filter weren’t even on it originally, let alone CWO, Sketch, Volt synth, Grid, DNA.
I can see how people would want things to be different with it but if you came from the OP-1, the Field adds so much. Plus with how easy it is to control it with phone apps like Drambo, or how I can record Koala onto the tape if I’m not feeling like using the Drum sampler, I tend to not really care about what it’s missing anymore because it’s easy to add that with iOS apps.
Obviously gear enjoyment is subjective though.
I mean, if you’re going into the perspective of “this device is X amount of money so it should have Y features” the OP-1 is definitely not the thing for you lol. The whole thing is limitations. One FX on a synth, 4 parameters per synth engine, can only use one synth engine at a time.
The workflow of the OP-1 was really meant that you record your loops onto the tape with various adjustments how you’d like to make different sections, and then use the tape tricks to live perform into the album. No different than Ableton really, except laid out horizontally rather than vertically. 6 minutes of tape space is probably enough for a live set, not just a single song, when going about it with this mentality.
This is how pretty much everyone used it 10 years ago. Even for the most part how Red Means Recording uses it.
It would definitely be a welcome addition to take buffers though I doubt that’s how it actually works. It’s probably more of a RAM thing as other tapes you have to load up individually, which would lead me to believe that the RAM probably wouldn’t be big enough to store four 12 minute files, even if you cut down on how many tapes you could have. They’d have to probably make it so that your project only has two tracks instead of four to double the length.
I do find it funny that the OP-1 always gets scrutinized for its pricing for its features but I don’t see that same thing directed towards other gear. For example the Isla S2400 which is a tad bit cheaper. Maybe people can justify the price because it has analog filters on the inputs and outputs and because it’s big with a bunch of faders? But it’s also chock full of limitations for a $1700 device. If you want to use live Loop mode you lose an entire bank of samples and at the high quality mode (16 bit 48khz) in stereo you have about 9 seconds of record across 8 recording buffers, you can lose a second bank of samples to double that. OP-1F has 40x the amount of recording time than that. Not to mention the S2400 doesn’t even have effects.
The entirety of working with OP-1 is getting creative with the limitations. If $2000 for a device full of limitations sounds bad then working with a computer or maybe an MPC is probably the more practical choice.
I really like it but as a hobbyist I can’t really justify to keep it. With the money, I might either buy a new computer or a more traditional synth with lot of knobs and analog engines (e.g Prophet x). If I was a professional successful producer or musician I would keep it for sure because it is a very good idea & ear candies generator