Anyone found a hidden setting in one of the fx that just adds straight up distortion?
After having more time with OP there’s a couple of fx I feel like I’m always reaching for that aren’t there. Especially a distortion suite and a realtime pitch shifter (actually, does the OP CWO effect already do straight forward dry/wet realtime pitch shift? Like on Roland Sp samplers? I need to check that out…) and/or an octave pedal/POG kind of thing. But yeah, an onboard distortion effect is something I reach for often and find the only option is to add drive on the master but this either effects everything or requires resampling if you just wanna aim it at a specific sound etc. Can feel like a hassle sometimes just to add dirt to a short synth sound etc.
I’d love some onboard saturation with the OP-1. Its the missing piece for me and I’ve tried numerous things to get this to happen but pushing digital hard is just not very musical sounding to my ears. I normally resort to line out> guitar effect > line in to record a part I want to be saturated or using a plugin outright on a final mix, neither of which are ideal but cuts out the whole resampling thing that can break the flow of what you are doing.
CWO pitch shifts pretty well and will get you in the ballpark of some of those Roland sounds. Give it a healthy dose of delay, some feedback and keep the frequency around 1/4-1/2. Sideband turned off pitch shifts down, sideband cranked shifts upwards. CWO has a lot of uses outside of the signature batshit mangling stuff it does, I tend to treat it more like an instrument than an effect. There are a lot of sweet spots as well as phasing type sounds to be found in there. It reminds me of the Rainbow Machine or the Echophon in some respects.
@wolflegion thanks for the insights. Had a deeper play with CWO (and slump) tonight. Very cool. Agreed it’s kinda like Rainbow Machine and does a lot more than just the chaos stuff I’d used it for before. I need to take my Rainbow Machine off my guitar board and try it on some synth/samples/drums stuff!
You’re right about CWO being almost like one of the synth engines. Kinda feels that way.
I know what you’re saying about digital distortion etc but I don’t mind it in some cases. Even the old distortion suite unit thing in Reason I found to be ‘ok’ pretty often back in the day and maybe that had the kind of small cpu hit that OP could cope with? Obvs there are way better dist/sat Plugins now but have a feeling they’d murder op cpu. Shame, would love to see Sly-Fi’s Kaya as an internal effect!
The spring reverb can sound pretty saturated if you happen to like that type of retro sound. It sounds especially great on bass sounds and plucked string synthesis.
@Callofthevoid The Rainbow Machine is one of my favourite pedals, so many sweet spot going on and it helped me understand CWO a little better. I’ve never ran a synth through it either which is weird because I’ve done that with pretty much all my other pedals. CWO + rainbow machine needs to happen if only just for kicks…
You are right that there is a time and a place for digital distortion. A bump in drive and pushing the eq hard will certainly start to do that but its more global than per part.
I’ve got a few tape saturation plugins and the hit on the CPU is heavy but it doesn’t stop me from dreaming…