I thought that this discussion might be an efficient way to organize our ongoing queries and “frustrations.” (Noob friendly)
Here’s mine:
Q) Why does my OP-1s BPM shift when I sync it to Abelton Live 9?
When I set Lives BPM to 95 the OP-1 drops down to around 87 BPM. I don’t get it, is this because of inappropriate MIDI settings? I don’t think it’s been a problem for me in the past and I’m wondering what I’ve done differently. Also when I activate Lives and the OP-1s metronome it’s obviously not in tempo, so I don’t understand how It’s trying to compensate.
When making your own drum kit samples, do they have to be evenly spaced out for the OP-1 to detect each one, or does it go my some type of transient detection? Or is it just old school and you need to define each one manually?
The day I got my OP-1 the other forums went down, so I haven’t been able to access any of the tips threads on setting up your own samples. Not really mentioned in the manual other than to say that you can do it.
I think they have to be set manually, but once they are, samples of the same bpm should fit in nicely. @yoof has some tips regarding this. I can’t remember exactly, but hopefully he chimes in.
Am I correct that you can only access one “project” of 6 minutes of Tape at a time on the OP-1?
If so, what’s the easiest way to initialize the OP-1 so I can start work on a new song? I thought format disk would do it, but then I had to reload the firmware and I got all the demo songs as well again. Is there an initialized version, or some way to do that from tha hardware?
Thanks for the help everyone. Been wanting one of these for ages and it’s more than I expected in a GREAT way. Now I want to dive in deep and get to work
Yes, six minutes of tape at a time. You can turn down the tape speed to get more, but the quality is reduced. I’ll usually have some partial projects going that sound decent but don’t really go anywhere, then record them down to album and move on to the next project. If you have all you want recorded to album, hitting the tape button with shift held will let you erase only the contents of the tape.
Some nice tips for new users and the new community board:
LIFT AND DROP: if you are planning to record something on a segment of tape, it is wise to lift and then drop the portion of tape to be recorded over. If the levels were off, or a bad note was played, just go back to the start point and drop the previous state of the tape. If a tape loop is enabled, shift plus lift will lift all four tracks in the selected region up to 22 seconds. Lifting individual tape tracks has a limit of up to 90 seconds.
STEREO: Each tape track is recorded in mono and sent to the stereo mixer where panning and levels can be adjusted. Lush pads and evolving panning sounds can be difficult to achieve on single tape tracks, so I recommend duplicating tracks panned hard against one another. This can be done by lifting the left channel and dropping it to the right channel. You can also make two separate recordings (either live or with one of the sequencers) and make modifications to the sound before the separate takes. For slight detune between parts, you can nudge the blue encoder on the tape screen while recording one of the passes. You could also adjust the master tune, or even set an element G force LFO to pitch and slightly adjust one of the sounds. Synth and effect parameters, such as delay time or feedback, are also fun to alter between two parts that make up a stereo sum.
There is also the Haas effect which can easily be achieved by lifting a take from one track and dropping it to another and holding shift on the tape screen and turning the blue encoder to slide the tape out of phase with its counterpart.
PANNING: A nice trick for a constant panning is to use the tremolo LFO. Record one sound to your left panned track with a positive or negative value on the volume parameter of the tremolo LFO, then record your right track with the same sound, but opposite value on the tremolo LFO. The result will be one channel raising in value at the same time as the other channel decreasing, giving the effect of a smooth left to right (or right to left) pan.
I’m creating my own drum sample files to import into the OP-1. How many can the OP-1 hold assuming each is 12 seconds long?
What about user presets (snapshots), since these are also audio files I imagine there’s a limit to how many you can store?
Do they have to be mono and 16bit, or is stereo allowed?
I really want to start customizing my OP-1 for an extrended writing session, but there’s no info on the limits of the user memory that I can find. Thanks for any help!
Agreed, the OP-1 Cookbook fills in a lot of the gaps the TE manual lacks. He’s laid out some very useful images to illustrate the Cookbook and has recently updated it a few months ago.
I have 28 drum kits and four 6 second Synth Sampler patches, and can still store a few Snapshots. Which is interesting, I was at 23 drum kits in recent memory, and my OP-1 told me to eat shit when I tried to store a snapshot.
Methinks it might clear away the cobwebs/defrag every so often on startup or operation?
