Battle 82: after much deliberating and being sidetracked by the arrival of the op-1 field, it finally hit me out of the blue; and it’s so simple. Of course this raises another question: Are these battles limited to the og op-1 or do we include the op-1 field as well? For this battle, I’m not going to discriminate. If you have an op-1, any kind of op-1, you can use it for this particular battle. Moving forward, maybe we let the person writing the battle brief decide. I think by including both iterations of the op-1, we can attract more participants. So, here’s the rules:
All entries must use some sort of distortion on at least one of their 4 tape tracks (that could be the overdriven sound of the op-1’s Drive resampled back to a track, or a distortion pedal in your input signal, or recording some singing through a blown speaker, really any way you can get some dirt on your song).
All songs must be completed (mixed/mastered/etc.)inside the op-1.
You are allowed to use one extra device (fuzz pedal, sampler, synth, etc.) but again, the final song must be completed on the op-1.
You may use the op-1 field or the og op-1.
Songs/Beats must be minimum 1:00 to maximum 6:00.
DEADLINE: Sunday, August 7th, noon.
Try to spread the word so we can get a respectable number of entries please.
Good luck and have fun with it.
I’m not sure I understand the question. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive do they? Your extra device can be in your input chain. Like I said, you can do it however you want.
So I can run another synth into an overdrive pedal into my OP-1’s input to sample, and make the track on the OP-1? Otherwise I am not sure how to incorporate an overdrive.
Can the input and output be used as a signal loop, recording its own output? I’m actually about to go try that lol
I kept it minimal. The extra gear I used can’t be heard; it’s Guitar Midi 2 with which I MIDI controlled the OP-1. It controlled the Dsynth and I recorded one take of a repetitive riff on which I improvised. The dirt comes from the Crank overdrive trick (on 4 in synth go to crank; then choose note/speaker icon and I think I used white instead of red).
Had to do some cuts in the tape to get 3 silences / mess-ups out. Some OP-1 EQ (bass a little down, middle a little up), reverb and drive (drive 78 and release 10). Recorded it to album and normalized to -10db in audacity.
In hindsight I would have liked it if I repeated the first phrase at least ones more.
This will be the 1st one for me. Been working on it for the last couple weeks. Trying my best just to use the OP-1f with my OG-1 as my second device, but I’m struggling to get it as dirty as I want, but making due.
We only have a couple of entries so far. Everyone please help me spread the word and if you haven’t entered the Battle, give it a shot, you might enjoy it and maybe even end up winning! We may end up extending this to get some more peeps.
Used my OP-1f to sketch the idea up, fleshed it out on my MPC Live II, brought some of it back into the OP-1f to cut, chop, and add ambience to! I would really appreciate any feedback at all, this is my first time entering one of these battles, and also really trying out finishing a “song” and I know I have a long way to go. Thanks!
This is all OP-1F, no external sounds at all… wanted to see how much dirt I could rub into it.
I recorded this into the porta 4-track on the OP-1F to get a lot of dirt. The base bpm is 114, but a lot of the darkness of the sounds is coming from playing with the tape speed, so a lot of tape speed changes to change the tone of different components, with probably the most extreme being +12 for one bit of recording, and -12 was the speed everything was played at to record it to the album.
As for effects, quite a bit of nitro to roll off the high end and then resonance to taste for some sounds. Also a touch of cow and phone to add some glitchiness into the sounds. The scratchy noise in the background was just from recording in a track on the FM channel, and then just changing channels to get it to tune in/out randomly for different noises.
The drum track came in at the end… and was something I went back and forth on, I actually recorded just an ambient mix, but felt the drums added a bit more to the sound so decided to stick with them.
As for the overall mix, I had to spend a lot of time just on the mixer page because the levels of distortion, and noise, and everything else were all over the place. Track values are literally 99/15/05/63… and let me tell you, that 05 really punches through the mix lol. With all the nitro magic, I also needed to boost the 10khz EQ up to near max to bring it back to roughly where I wanted it. I followed this up with Grid, just to add some weird feedback and delay kind of effect, with just a touch to taste bit more of noise. At this point, the mix was pretty solid, but to wrap it all up, I adjusted master volume up to nearly where I wanted it, and then tweaked the drive to 25 and release to 30, just to give it a bit more punch.
Had fun just messing with the OP-1F and definitely interested to see where others go with this
I just finished recording my first song to album, and realized it’s almost 1 am, so i will be figuring out how to upload it to SoundCloud tomorrow after work lol.
