hey @rudolphrapid this might seem like a bit of an “almost” answer… But my mixes got better on the OP the more tracks I made. I think now I’ve got about 60 or so full tracks just on the OP, and probably the first 30-40 of them didn’t really achieve what I wanted to mix-wise.
The biggest thing IMO to get your head around is the super low headroom of the device - as soon as a kick or bass sound comes in the whole mix gets compressed and squishes right up. If you fight against this, you will be really disappointed (as I was at first), BUT, if you roll with it you’ll find that your arrangements will change slightly, and you will kind of compose/arrange your tracks around the sound of the instrument, rather than the other way around. Once I began to embrace the sound of the OP1 my mixes on it got a lot better.
The big one is trying to get decent low-lows (and subs) out of it, as this eats up the most headroom. In my battle track above, you can hear the sub kick hit at 0:31, but then when the other instruments come in and kind of gets swallowed up in the headroom. I just accept the fact that it’s not going to be a club-bangin-mixing-device! My favourite trick for firming up drums is to resample them (using Ear) over themselves, which boosts the hell out of them and hard-comps them quite a bit. I always keep a “backup” by lifting the tape first, in case the resampled version is too aggressive.
Kind of reminds me of the famous vinyl-sim from the SP303/505, which I mentioned (and compared) in a thread a few months back.
In terms of stereo, I almost always arrange my tape tracks like this:
1. Drums, FX, some samples - centred.
2. Harmonics (synths, samples, backup vocals) - panned hard left
3. Harmonics (synths, samples, backup vocals) - panned hard right
4. Bass, occasionally a third Harmonic addition - centred
If I do lead vocals they will live on tracks 1 or 4, or sometimes I will sacrifice a harmonic track to do vocals instead.
hope this helps!