Battle 82: A Little Dirt Is Good For You

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:

  1. 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).
  2. All songs must be completed (mixed/mastered/etc.)inside the op-1.
  3. 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.
  4. You may use the op-1 field or the og op-1.
  5. 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.

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I can’t help but think of OTO Biscuit and @Virtual_Flannel

recognizing, without a doubt, inspiration. :v:

maybe I can dirty up a little track, if I dust off my Biscuit.

no promises. lmao.

How many OP-1s can we use? Would an additional OP-1 count as one of the single extras?

How do you get a pedal in your input signal if that’s your extra device?

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op-1 Field is the best. can’t wait to get even more dirt all up on it.

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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.

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I’m going to say yes, extra op-1 should count as extra device.

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bump. If you’ve never entered one of these battles, why not give it a try.

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

Yes. Of course you can run a synth into overdrive pedal. Exactly what I was talking about.

Here is my entry:

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.

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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.

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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.

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I am hoping to finish mine up this weekend!

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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!

EDIT: If anyone is curious what the first draft was like from stock OP-1f samples and slightly modified presets, I uploaded an early sketch to youtube: Darkwave jam on Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field - YouTube

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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 :smiley:

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Hi all, here is my entry on my OG OP-1!

Distortion methods:

  1. internal sample leveling (+12, etc w/ shift-red knob)
  2. hidden filter (All Pass and Low Pass settings w/ high resonance)
  3. Nitro - lots of envelope follower and resonance
  4. input level boost to near or over max on most tracks/overdubs
  5. all mixer levels at 99

Bonus piece of kit was my new VC-340 (obvs from the vocoder intro…)

Had a lot of fun with this one, thanks for a great brief!

Enjoy,
psound74

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Calling you out to keep you accountable :wink:

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I’m counting 5. Not too shabby but I know we can do better. C’mon people!!!

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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. :sleeping:

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