Hey guys, I’m a super beginner/novice on anything dealing with actually producing music and I haven’t bought an OP-1 for myself yet. I’m doing research on it before I invest that much into one device. But my question is, would it be possible to take an existing song (made with OP-1 or another means) from a laptop and import it back to the OP-1 and add effects to it even if it has vocals/lyrics on it? If the answer is yes, is it possible to add effects to the vocals or add new instrumental feels to it? Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Yeh doable but remember tape tracks and synth/drum samples are mono. So you’d prob wanna export from daw as 4 mono stems. Tape tracks can be panned or resampled with OP fx then exported back to Daw for panning etc. Tbh what youre talking about is not something I’d look at doing personally for a full song, but maybe elements. Obvs YMMV 
Is it possible - yes, with some caveats.
Chances are the OP1 won’t have the necessary indicators of where the regions are, so it might find itself in a strange place - indicating blank tape but with recorded material on the .aif track files. The OP1 also “defragments” the track files you copy to it, which is somewhat painful to watch and I feel it takes too long. All in all you might be better off simply recording into the OP1 via line-in, then exporting your material from the OP1 back to your daw.
If you know how the OP1 structures its files, it might be possible to start with a set of prepared track aiff-s, then copy material over the audio portions, before importing them. My guess is, the five minutes it will spend realigning the files on its drive, you could spend simply recording the (mono) stem you wanted to process via line-in.
The OP1’s design works best when it doesn’t have to consider i/o or other kit at all - simply you using the OP1 by itself. You might find that enjoyable enough to take you away from the DAW for sketching purposes. Read through the forum for more praise and criticism.