Hey everyone. I’ve had my OP-1 unit for a while, but ever since whenever I encounter Dsynth\Dbox tools, i get extremly scared by them and all my tries to handle them made no use and I still struggle to understand them. I am somehow familiar with different synth methods, tweaked some of software and hardware stuff with some digestible results. But these are real challenge for me. Can anyone give tips or share their kits with explanation on how they’ve been done?
I couldn’t find them in the online manual. Common problem with both is that the controls abbreviate or obscure the actual parameter changes, Dsynth is a kind of FM, the pink waveform is the carrier, blue is Modulator (hence M by 2), 0-1 is the relative rate (frequency) of modulator (shift+blue), 1 (blue) seems to be an overly clever control of the balance between the two. Green/shift+green is self-explanatory, white/shift+white is the same kind of unfortunate envelope control - decay from short to long and past long it becomes attack; Orange (mode) seems to be a saturation of sorts and shift+orange is a some kind of pre-filter to the saturation effect. You get 24x slots of the same in DBox and you can lift/drop between them if you practice the voodoo first. In fact Dbox is interesting with that you can treat it as a synth, it would transpose ok, and you can program subtle changes for all keys. Good fun for sound design even though it sounds like 8-bit shit, and extremely frustrating if you know your way around oscillators, filters, envelopes. Give it more time and tries.
Good fun for sound design even though it sounds like 8-bit shit, and extremely frustrating if you know your way around oscillators, filters, envelopes. Give it more time and tries.
Yeah, i cant quite get it if these synths are more of a traditional way around or have some TE own flow, as with others. My impression is that they have a bit of both, but this makes them somehow confusing for me. And yeah, I’m still not sure if you can pump something more out of dbox than 8-bit glitches. It sounds like you can reilably variate on some 8-bit noizes, but creating some at least 808-ish sounds is quite hard. Well, i guess it at least suits my idm\cyberglitch needs, but I kind of treated dbox like Maschine’s drumsynth, maybe thats why they confuse me.
yeah… i get the confusion, but tbh, the disconnect from expected parameters and the standard signal flow is great imo.
you have to listen. you don’t just tune in to certain sounds based on what you already understand about synthesis.
there are a lot of great sounds to found, particularly with the potential for resampling. i’ve recently been working on creating entire drum kits sampled exclusively from the op-1.
punch is your friend if you wanna reach some of those 808 depth charge style kicks.
dSynth is my favorite by far. I agree though - it has the narrowest sweetspots ever and one should’t apply existing knowledge of subtractive synthesis.
dBox requires a lot of patience - but well worth it IMO
here’s an example for a chromatically tuned dBox patch I made an entire age ago with a single pattern and live tweaks:
dSynth is my favorite by far. I agree though - it has the narrowest sweetspots ever and one should't apply existing knowledge of subtractive synthesis.dBox requires a lot of patience - but well worth it IMOhere's an example for a chromatically tuned dBox patch I made an entire age ago with a single pattern and live tweaks:https://soundcloud.com/tasmansea/tasmansea-op1-dboxonly-livejam
This is pretty nice stuff, right here. I’ve dicked around with DBox a bit but I kinda wanna save my energy for actually learning how to sequence drums properly with the “sane” kits.
Very fun stuff is possible from the OP-1’s more difficult engines, like DNA
@<a href=“https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/profile/1886/Jellygeist” class=“Username” style=“margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold; font-size: 15px; font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(66, 157, 168); line-height: 22.1px; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>Jellygeist - thanks!.. pretty much every tune on my soundcloud involves dSynth in one way or the other. ‘munich’ is dSynth only with an added field recording
Nice track indeed!
I must be misunderstanding Mr. Ritchie’s OP-1 Cookbook because I think it says that for DBox, I should be able to switch DBox presets with Shift+[1-8] but instead I keep switching to other drum presets outside of DBox.
dSynth is my favorite by far. I agree though - it has the narrowest sweetspots ever and one should't apply existing knowledge of subtractive synthesis.dBox requires a lot of patience - but well worth it IMOhere's an example for a chromatically tuned dBox patch I made an entire age ago with a single pattern and live tweaks:https://soundcloud.com/tasmansea/tasmansea-op1-dboxonly-livejam
For some reason it sounds like “if moog was digital” to me, i.e. quite nice. Good track. I think i expected dsynth to be more smooth, but it is quite gritty sounding.
Yes, I too have found that while tweaking some parameters in Dbox/Dsynth, the sound can change dramatically even with just a tiny knob twist.
My Moog Voyager responded very smoothly to knob tweaks. The MS-20 Mini and Microbrute can both be a bit more “twitchy” in that regard, as neither have that famously smooth 4-pole, 24db/octave Moog filter.
I wish there was more than one slot for DSynth in the synth preset browser. All the other synth engines get a fair number of slots. Same with DBox on the drum side.
I wish there was more than one slot for DSynth in the synth preset browser. All the other synth engines get a fair number of slots. Same with DBox on the drum side.
You might want to take a look at the beta. It has a bunch of DSynth and DNA presets and they are mighty fine.
I’ll wait for the official release, thanks, lol
I’ll wait for the official release, thanks, lol
Worth the wait then 
here another dsynth track. it’s the only sound source ran through a bunch of sequenced filters
here another dsynth track. it's the only sound source ran through a bunch of sequenced filtershttps://soundcloud.com/tasmansea/lidded
This is exceptional work
This is exceptional work
thanks so much for the kind comment. and for listening of course… still contemplating if I should re-install the bass voice I had designed for it - but it got kinda busy the way it is I guess
This is exceptional work
thanks so much for the kind comment. and for listening of course… still contemplating if I should re-install the bass voice I had designed for it - but it got kinda busy the way it is I guess
There is always the temptation to add more, to keep tweaking until every perceived flaw is ironed out.
But we gotta let these things fly at some point, and this flies very well.
dSynth is my favorite by far. I agree though - it has the narrowest sweetspots ever and one should't apply existing knowledge of subtractive synthesis.dBox requires a lot of patience - but well worth it IMOhere's an example for a chromatically tuned dBox patch I made an entire age ago with a single pattern and live tweaks:https://soundcloud.com/tasmansea/tasmansea-op1-dboxonly-livejam
tasmansea, I just registered on this forum just to comment on your track.
I -LOVE- it !
I can’t lay my finger on it, but it has the same sonic quality that I’m attracted to in Allesandro Cortini’s work with the Music Easel. Gritty and direct sounding, yet friendly and musical…
As I just bought my OP-1 last week, I would really appreciate any insights on how you achieved this…
So I guess the way to have more than one DBox preset in the preset selector is to mess with the OP-1 file structure using a computer. At least that’s what this part of the online guide seems to imply.
Basically, create a new snapshot folder under dbox.
@<a href=“https://www.operator-1.com/index.php?p=/profile/2572/PeteFizz” class=“Username” style=“margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-weight: bold; font-size: 15px; font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(66, 157, 168); background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>PeteFizz hey bud, huuuge compliment. thanks so much for taking the time and writing this down. very flattered and happy indeed you can connect to this. <span style=“color: rgb(37, 38, 30); font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>Allesandro Cortini’s work is something I look up to for sure. He added the “like” to the track I’m most proud of certainly (flattered to death). It was part of a challenge on the old OP1 forum. rules were to only use dBox and any sequencer, no tape and only one pattern recorded straight to album (or so - pretty restricted anyway).
<span style=“color: rgb(37, 38, 30); font-family: “lucida grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(252, 252, 255);”>so I made a patch with half of the keyboard generating percussion sounds and the other half more “melodic” sounding notes with sustain. This was already tuned to my own ‘scale’ rather than just making a chromatic progression. this allows you to play percussion as well as melodies at the same time. shift+note/key will allow you to tweak a specific key’s synthesis whilst the pattern is running… now here’s the trick: you copy this patch a bunch of times and not only tweak the synthesis a little but also shuffle the melodic keys around. this way, the same pattern will play an entirely different melody if you wish so. switching the patches whilst the pattern is running gives you a lot of mileage and you can also transpose the entire pattern by just triggering it from a different key ( this restarts the pattern and it’ll be hard to transpose anything but a perfect fifth and still get a harmonic result) … hope this helps (and even makes sense). welcome to the forum!