Hi all,
This is Jesper from Teenage Engineering.
Sometimes I check this forum to see what you Elektron users are up to.
It is always interesting, especially for me who have been working on some of the Elektron machines as a designer. I love that you comment on all kinds of stuff, have feature requests, get mad about details etc.
I never write comments on forums, so this is the one and only exception.
I do it because I want you Elektron users to get the background story of the OP-1. And to clear things out a little bit in this thread.
Around 1999/2000 I was doing the final work on the MonoMachine and had daily discussions with Daniel Hansson about what machine to do next. I told Daniel about my dream of a machine I have sketched on, based on the Roland SH-101 but in a pocket format. Daniel loved the idea, but was concerned about the battery power and the overall performance of a machine in that size. Remember that this was 10 years ago, and the technology wasn’t quite there yet. So he told me to continue to sketch up a concept, but keep it more or less outside Elektron.
Anyway, I started to work on the machine as a side project. (Daniel and the Elektron team had another vision about a more live / dj sampling machine (UW that later bacame the Octatrack I guess) I did a lot of sketches of the functionality and renderings. And finally Daniel called me one day and said Elektron had a collaboration with Evolution to make a portable machine / controller. As you might guessed, when we presented the stuff, they thought we were insane and rejected all of it. It was too expensive. Impossible to manufacture, no clear target group etc. That could have been the end of story, but it wasn’t.
As some of you know a tragic incident happend a few years later. In 2007 Daniel died in a car accident. He was one of my best friends and it was a great loss. He had called me just a couple of weeks before and wanted to show me a sketch of a new machine he had been working on for some time. (I don’t know what he had in mind, but I guess the Octatrack is in a close direction, even if I know there’s at least one other great talent behind that machine.)
At that time me and some friends had just started Teenage Engineering. I was still doing some work for Elektron, but when Daniel passed away, it wasn’t just the same for me and I guess Elektron also wanted move on and build a strong team in Gotheburg, which I think was right. So the opportunity the make a portable machine was more or less gone.
All this came to a conclusion. If we don’t make this machine ourselfs, no one else will. So we have put all our effort, time and money to make this machine real.
In many ways as a tribute to Elektron, but also to make a a 10 year old dream to make an extraordinary instrument come true.
With that said, I just want you to know how emotional a project like this is. It’s not about business or being smart or about money. It’s your life. We do this because we love it.
We have dreamed about this machine and it’s functions for so many years. We have all put a large piece of ourselfs into this. This of course makes us sensitve for speculations etc.
I guess the above applies for the Elektron team as well.
So… let us clear things out.
No, it’s not a clever marketing strategy lending out an OP-1 pre-production unit to a House Mafia band. They just wanted to use it as a prop in their vid. And it ended up as the center piece of the video. We had nothing to say about it. And of course the track wasn’t made on the OP-1. It isn’t out yet. And yes, you can create a song like that (why do someone who has never touched an OP-1 write things like "that’s not possible to do on an OP-1?). Come on… it’s not that hard. And remember that the OP-1 is also a controller, so it’s nothing wrong to visually connect the OP-1 with a song made in Logic.
Keep up the good work Elektron.
-Jesper
Ps. We have some really great stuff going on. Ds.