Teenage Engineering OP-Z

That video made me think of Better Call Saul!

Lumen, midi controlled by the Z.

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Great software!

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Street Fighter inspired this time. Still some very ropey use of the punch in FX but really love how far you can take a single pattern with this thing. And still not used a screen with it once!

Anyway, won’t clog up this thread any more with crappy tunes - again, just examples of how “reasonable” one can get with this thing after less than a week of owning it. 2 patterns here.

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Thanks to the info on here i got an OP-Z and now i have 2 questions regarding sample import:

  1. How should i import a drumloop? Loop it in my daw and cut it exactly after 6 seconds and then put it into a synth slot of the op drum utility to create an aif file?
  2. And what about drum hits? I understand they should already have the right levels because you can’t change the level of a single sample. Is that right?

The drum samples can be up to 12 seconds total for the kit. I recommend slicing your loop into individual hits and then loading those slices into the drum utility, that way it’s more flexible than just having it as a full loop (or using it in the synth tracks).

I’ve just assumed this is the case for my own sample packs, and so I basically normalise everything before making the kits. The drum utility allows you to adjust gain per hit, but I’m not sure if it carries across to the OP-Z (pitch per hit does though!)

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A month after the launch, its still hard to grasp what this machine does. The manual is still super vague about most things. Their youtube videos were a lot about the unity/visualisation feature which is so niche that probably only 1% of their users will ever touch.

At this point, I’d really like to see a youtube video showcasing all the synth engines inluding their parameters to see what kind of sounds this machine is capable of because the youtube videos thus far sound very chiptune-like and I dont need to shell out 600 Euros for that.

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Not all of them. It’s very diverse, it can sound however you want it to sound. It just takes some creative thinking in order to push it.

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I posted this earlier but this is the video that did it for me.

I was kind of in a similar place as you but this plus Cuckoo’s tutorial and step components videos really opened up my understanding.

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Another recent fave by Sinerider:

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Thanks a lot!

So I learned today that on a synth track if you press track and record you get a random patch. A bit hit and miss but very cool when looking for some inspiration.

Did another little track when I realised you could sequence punch in FX and pattern transposition - very cool! Also used step components for the first time in a big way which is very cool. Didnt realise you could randomise some of these. And while I didnt use it on this track, it only just sunk in that you can “mute” tracks from the tape sends - no wonder my tape attempts always ended up sounding rank!

If anyone is interested, check out my soundcloud linked in a few posts above. Didn’t want to hog this thread with my shit!

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Now I’m getting used to it I can mostly use it without the screen and can put something together really quickly. The only difficult thing is the LFO destination which isn’t obvious from the LEDs.

Theres a few things that seem like odd omissions, or maybe I’m just missing something. There are basically only 2 LFO shapes that you can blend between? And no way to route an LFO to pitch, delay time, or tape speed?

The reverb has a lot of character, but it would be nice to have more than one type. Unless I turn it way up its quite hard to even hear it. Perhaps also a compressor effect that you could route just the drums through.

Resampling would be super useful, if you could just write a pattern into a free drum slot. I guess your slots would fill up pretty quickly though. Maybe a new hardware component that acts as a sampler, with more storage?

Does anyone know if there’s a way to copy a track pattern over to another track pattern? For example, copy a chord track pattern over to a bass track pattern. Thanks!

Not tried it yet but I think it is possible. Check out the biggest OPZ Facebook group as someone posted it over the weekend.

All I remember is that it involves hitting he shift button three times haha. Not helping much there but I’m sure it was a recent post

Thanks for that. I’ll check out the FB group. I know there’s a way to copy say a chord pattern to another chord pattern but I’m hoping to copy to other tracks within the same overall pattern (oh man, my head is spinning now…haha). Chords to bass or something like that, for example.

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Maybe what I saw was a like for like copy from one pattern to the next, not sure. Be cool to be able to do what you’re after though.

The Facebook group is full of good tips and tricks though. Well worth checking out

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Saw this on Reddit. Sounds very good

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Couchperfect.

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Digitone + OP-Z! I love the way these two sound together.

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