How do you feel about it? Do you think OP1 has its very own unique sound-character, or do you perceive its engines more neutral, more a ‚sculpture anything you want‘ kind of thing? (To a certain extend of course)
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I think the op-1f has very unique sound engines. They are very TE flavored, but there is one issue kinda missing from the discussion : the mutability of presets, or creation of patches. In that respect you’re somewhat limited, however you can alter the patches to create some totally unrelated and different sounding presets completely. So i dont see the neutrality to sculpture , but i see them as a very set blueprint or template to work with albeit heavily influenced. Again ofc, you dont have to adhere to that character….but the fact there is no initial default preset to manipulate speaks for itself i think
But to your question, I love the sound of the op-1f engines, and i love the way you can manipulate them. I’ve never had more fun “exploring” syntheses than with the op1f, but that’s also because it has such unique engines (coupled with their effects). And what’s more is i love all 11….very happy with them actually, not a sound I couldn’t find or make or want in there (and if there is, i can just sample that synth sound haha)
Hope that is a decent reply to a thoughtful question
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Hey, that’s a nice and also thoughtful reply and way to describe it☺️. I think the engines are well designed to sound really good together, at the same time without forcing your work into anything. I only have the Og. Op1 but also love all of the engines.
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I think some of the engines have a pleasing, musically useful sound character such as the dimension, digital, and fm synths. others, such as pulse and dna are head scratchers. I have yet to find a musically useful purpose for the pulse engine, and that filter is possibly the worst sounding filter I’ve ever heard. any smidge of resonance and the whole thing just distorts like a bad early 00s audio interface.
I feel similarly about the effects: mother is one of the best sounding reverbs ever, but I can’t figure out what the purpose of the phone effect. I get that it’s out there and sure it can be fun to experiment, but the scope of the effect (and most of the other effects and synth engines) is not very broad, so it feels less experimental to me and more like a preset that was dialed in to not sound very good. also, why is the delay effect not stereo? That drives me nuts.
to be honest I don’t use the synth engines much on my op1. Mostly stick to the sampler, which in my opinion is really good!
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i know what you mean. ive found that over the years, by experimenting for long periods of time, ill stumble upon one very precise setting on a lot of the synths and effects that really produces very interesting and musical effects. it has taken me a lot of time to stumble upon these and ive always had to use shift + rotate encoder (smaller increments) in order to find these “sweet spots”
for the phone, ive found its most useful on transients (so drums usually rather than synths) because of the artifacts/glitches that can be rhythmic as part of the beat.
for the cow, its similar to the phone where some of the settings produce rhythmic artifacts similar to a delay might.
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You have an interesting way of finding those sweet spots
The coolest thing so far has been connecting my guitar, loading vocoder, setting the LFO To the element, and then modulating an fx like CWO.
Have you tried this?
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oo nice no i haven’t tried the LFO idea! ive really spent prob way too much time with guitar line in with the CWO effect and tinkering with sweet spots manually with shift + encoder (fine). id say my fav or one of my favs so far was a CWO sweet spot that had this crazy delay where all the artifacts were still in key with D mixolydian scale - i was doing this random free improv and happened to have the tape rolling at the right time for once lol:
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Very nice man!!!
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I feel like the OP-1 Field engines definitely have improved since the OG, which makes sense due to 32bit audio and stereo signals.The sound asthetic is very digital (of course), though not in a negative way I think, as you can get quite unique granular artifacts when using certain effects. But I don’t use the presets too much, to be fair.
For me it’s more about the easy and quick way of feeding instruments into the OP-1 Field and then being able to manipulate the samples again in a very convenient and quick way. This and the possibility of running around anywhere I want and being able to record anything I want, is what makes this thing so incredibly useful for me.
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I also think it’s more interesting to make synth sounds that are closely tied to the FX, like when the velocity change some fx parameter.
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Nice☺️ Would you still suggest OP1 field as a kind of lofi-sound for the main part? Also aside in comparison to OG.? Or is it more like that it had evolved to more like to a super clear synthesis like you know it from common DAWs, also due to the 32bit?