When I realized that the OP-XY implements lots of features of the Pocket Operators I really missed on the OP-1 I was very excited and hoping to also find my favorite feature for live jamming with the Pocket Operators: changing (and locking) the pitch of activated sequencer steps with the rotary encoder knobs (the same way you lock other parameters like gain, synthesizer parameters etc.)
Not sure if fire sharing via Google drive works, but here is an example:
Up to now I didn’t find such a feature - and since the OP-XY has a piano keyboard and the PO’s only have rotary knobs to set the pitch this looks like the reason why the TE devs didn’t consider this a feature you need on the OP-XY.
Is there some hack that allows me to enter / change / lock pitch via a rotary encoder? Shouldn’t this be a feature for a device like OP-XY?
This was a feature on the OP-Z, so a lot of folks were (and are) expecting it on the XY as well. The big difference is the Z’s pitch parameter affects all samples on a track, which is probably easier to approach than the XY where each sample has its own pitch parameter that isn’t buried in a separate menu.
I can only think of two workarounds, and unfortunately neither involves the rotary encoder:
Step components: use the Tonality component to change the pitch of all notes on a step. Add a Skip Component and you can vary when it does/doesn’t affect pitch.
Record pitch bend. You can’t parameter lock or edit pitch bend, and it doesn’t respond to Skip Parameter, but it does affect pitch.
Sorry those don’t accomplish what you were hoping for but they’re all I got
Just to be sure we’re talking about the same thing here (I’m neither a native English speaker nor a musician, so my terminology might be wrong): with ‘pitch’ I don’t mean continuous frequency modulation as in ‘pitch bend’ but the notes on the scale (a b c d e f g …).
On the Pocket operators you could easily ‘program’ a ‘melody’ by holding ‘write’ in playback-mode and turning the left knob (which is also the only way to write notes). And on PO-20 (arcade) you could then even apply chord progression (for some of the instruments). This made life-jamming especially easy because you didn’t have to fiddle with single notes in order to change the whole melody (which was in-scale automatically)
You’re right that pitch bend wouldn’t serve your purposes, but step components might be the way to go. The following step components will vary what note is played on a certain step based on the other notes in the track, and can respond to changes on the Brain/Master track:
Tonality
Ramp Up
Ramp Down
Random
It’s a bit different than on a pocket operator, but you get a lot more control and can add a lot more randomization and variation by combining the above step components with components like Skip Component, Skip Trigger, etc.
I’ve made a lot of videos about using step components on the OP-Z (playlist), and my videos on the above four also apply to the XY. I haven’t used the Brain/Master track much at all, though, so I don’t think I have any videos going into depth on that.
Let me know if you have more questions or could use more resources–I’ve got a bunch of stuff scattered all over the internet and I’d be happy to link you to more if that’d be helpful
