If battles are a way to explore things you wouldn’t normally do, here’s something I’ve never done: play part of a song live on the OP-1 and record a video of it.
Rules:
You must submit a video which clearly shows you playing all or part of your song on your OP-1.
You must use the element LFO set to the g-force sensor on at least one instrument. This is to inspire a bit of movement in your performance.
External sounds (radio, instruments, other synths, etc.) are permitted but only as samples, played back via the sampler / drum sampler.
Video editing is permitted but discouraged.
The quality of the video doesn’t matter – use your phone camera suspended from your desk with your OP-1 on the floor; use your laptop’s webcam pointing down at your OP-1, anything you like as long as we can see what is going on.
The audio quality does matter. Ideally, connect your OP-1 audio output straight into your camera’s audio input when recording the video. If you can’t, record audio on the OP-1 and inject it into the video afterwards.
Unlike Battle 55, the goal is not necessary to create the whole song in one live take. Tape playback and sequencer engines are allowed. But there must be an obvious connection between the video we see and the sounds we hear.
Some ideas:
create a backing track on tape, then perform a melody part live on the video
sequence your track, then “play” the sequencer and effects live
create short tape loops, then manipulate them live like in Battle 55
all of the above!
The deadline is 1 month (5 weeks) from now: Sunday 23rd June. It’s 2 days after the June solstice. Maybe that can inspire you!
Can you clarify what you mean by Gravity LFO because nothing in the manual uses that name? do you mean the element LFO set to g-force sensor as the input source?
Here’s my first attempt. Here I was trying to create a track live from a blank tape using the sequencers. I found it a bit too difficult and I’m not too happy with the results, but I’m sharing it here anyway to inspire those of you reading to do better
I recorded this using my phone for video and a Zoom H4n recorder for audio. I used kdenlive to crop the video, sync it with the real audio and add a distort effect at the end
I can give a bit more detail on how i did the editing if anyone is stuck; video editing programs tend to be a bit tricky to get started with …
Here’s an entry. I sampled some of my own guitar work in and made a slow little jam out of it. Some parts of it remind me of an old western, or a Tarantino soundtrack or something. In the spirit of op1 films, I used a prop. In this case, a .50 cal round seemed strangely appropriate. I also downloaded some free video editing software from shotcut. It has some funny effects that I was messing around with just for fun. Audio was recorded into logic pro and synced with the video. I also brought along my kp3 mini. Is that cheating? Oh well. I had fun. Awesome battle idea.
I also filmed this one too while my gear was setup. The video editing is pretty wacky, but I am amusing myself. Half the time I spent on making this video was finding the box of my old toys for props lol.
I recorded this video with my phone balanced on a box balanced on my desk, so it’s quite wobbly. I fixed that and did several more takes, but this one was the best musically speaking. So I decided to embrace the wobble and throw some “old film” effects on top to add even more!
From looking thru old voting threads, it seems that as the host of the battle, i’m not eligible to win. Which would mean… the triumphant victor is Kohlberg! Which is a well deserved victory in any case. Your video makes me want a chaos pad.
Honestly, this is kind of a bummer. It was a great battle idea. I was looking forward to a whole slew of awesome op-1 videos! Oh well though. It can sometimes be tough to find the time to do the things we want to do. Let me think this over for a bit and I will post a new battle soon. Thanks @ssam!
I wonder if it would make sense to have some battles where any combination of TE instruments could enter… the OP-Z battle got a whole load of entrants, perhaps it’s just that people are a little bored of their OP-1’s after 10 years.
Let’s close battle and open voting!