I’m learning the OP-Z partly by recreating Daft Punk - Around The World on it. One thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how to do the long 8-bar upwards low-pass filter sweep on the OP-Z that happens on the drums in the song’s intro.
Two problems:
I know you can record parameter automation into a pattern by moving the filter wheel while holding record, but I don’t know how to extend this to 8 bars (vs the 1 bar that each 16 step pattern represents), so I can’t figure out how to record an automation this long.
I can’t see any way to do a filter sweep on all drum tracks at the same time, only one at a time, so I can’t see how to record the whole drum part to a single track in my OP-1 even if I was willing to just bounce this 8-bar drum track with the sweep to audio.
Curious if anyone can help me see a way to do this with the OP-Z? I feel like this is something I could do very easily in Ableton but I’m a bit stumped!
I can’t guarantee this will do exactly what you want, and I don’t tend to get hung up too long on trying to achieve a specific thing if the machine wants to do something else… but it’s always instructive to try.
If you want to bounce it out you could solo the drum section and use the filter on the master track. If you run the master track with a step length 8x the drum tracks you could record this over the necessary bar count (or do it in real time.) It’s a little tricky to get the start and end right, not sure if the latch / free mode makes a difference.
I thought it might be possible to link the drum tracks and then send the filter cutoff CC from another track with a MIDI loopback cable but it seems like track linking doesn’t pass CCs. I don’t know another way to change the incoming MIDI channel.
There are a few approaches you could take and none are perfect.
I don’t know how to extend this to 8 bars (vs the 1 bar that each 16 step pattern represents), so I can’t figure out how to record an automation this long.
Hold Track + Shift and press 1-8 (i.e., C#1-A#2 on the keyboard) to change step length. From 1-8 the numbers represent how many 16th notes each step is worth. The downside is you lose resolution and it won’t be a gradual sweep as much as it will be jumps between each step.
As the other reply mentioned, you could instead change the master track’s length to 8 and automate the master filter.
If you’re willing to make all the drum tracks 8 bars you could add a Sweep step component to the first step of each drum track.
Lastly, you can apply a filter sweep to all drums via the performance track (F#2 is sweep, I think) but it won’t be the direction or length you’re asking for.
The MIDI loopback does work btw, but I could only get it to control one track with a single channel, I tested it using the Lights track. So I think if you can find four tracks to send CC3 to channels 1 to 4 it could work. 15 and 16 are probably available, and you may be able to use the effects and/or tape track. This requires one of the MIDI modules of course.