Hey,
for building structure, making progression on tracks or to expand loops into whole songs, I love the way when you use track buttons 1-4 live in playback-mode to add and substract, while switching from loop to loop with shift and the arrow keys. Recording straight to album. It‘s working great and is a musical and organic way of finding the paths of your songs.
But then as an alternative workflow, I want to build a track on the tape itself, but often, after a while with adding more and more loops, regions, overdubs, rejected parts you want to keep etc, things quickly can go messy. Mostly I have the raw stuff on the start of the tape. At around say min 2 or 3 I start building the track. I would really love to do it the entire way through and create the whole thing just in OP1. But then, when your track is nearly done, your tape is full and then you decide to change bigger parts - a lot of crazy lift drop and tape skipping adventure begins. Mostly, after a certain point, I shove it over to DAW where it ends up for further editing - which is what I would like to avoid.
Maybe you have better approaches to work with tape and longer tracks or songs?
What are your ways of Building or organizing material on the tape?
I’m working in a messy creative order anyway. Sometimes after a few loops a new idea pops out, or new ones came by just playing around. There are times where I have 3 or 4 different ideas or scetches on one tape🤤
i think to some degree those limitations are unavoidable as a given project becomes more complex because the op1f is more of a DAW “lite” hehe - but that said i think there might be some clever ways to reduce the complexity or at least how it is represented/manifested in the op1f tape. here are a few things ive done to help:
take a backup of your entire tape project to your computer via MTP or if you have room make a duplicate tape on your op1f with the new duplicate feature. this will allow you to feel more free to “take risks” within your project and ive found that this opens me up to stumble upon happy accidents
use the scissors to snip a section into some piece of audio that is the exact duration of some section of music, say just the chorus or the verse. then when you are playing through your track and the playhead is over this part you can hold shift and then hit 3 (the loop button) and it will automatically create loop on this “snipped” section of audio. i do this all over the place so that i dont have to worry about creating loops in real time at exactly the right length.
merge lift/drop: this is helpful when combining 2 or more tracks together but i would say that you ought to be careful because there is no going back (although with point 1 about backups you can sometimes find great use of consolidating your project sections)
when you are finding that you have 3-4 separate ideas or sketches, and i often find this too, its best to move them each into their own project and work on them independently. i find that taking backups of each tape and then saving them for some other day can be liberating because then you know you will come back to it but you dont have to worry about messing up what’s on your sketchpad tape project
lastly, its inevitable and imo delightful aspect of how projects get finalized in the op1f: you must “perform” your project on your op1f. its kind of a instrument in its own right and so when you are laying down the final audio, usually i find that this entails some elaborate “performance” with muting, looping, etc.
also, i have been creating music 100% within the op1f for about a year now and i pasted one of my finished projects below to give you a reference of how “complex” my final piece is. perhaps mine is not as complex as yours but i found that this project and my others never got too bulky or cluttered within the op1f tape.
sorry to spam this but i had another realization that sometimes those random “sketches” that are all unrelated and are all cool sounding but dont quite have a home, you can just force them into one song like i did here lol. im not kidding i just decided i dont want these little ideas to go collect cobwebs but i can’t find a home/song for them so ill just put them one after another all in one song. strangely, listening back, they somehow sound related but they were all disjunct and random.
Hey, that’s great:) love your jazzy vibe in your songs. They are broad and spacious at the same time:) Did you do the guitar and piano parts with the ribbon mic, (mentioned in another post)?
hey thanks so much, appreciate you checking out my music and for the nice comments. im still in somewhat of an “experimentation” phase of how best to render the guitar in my songs. if my memory serves me correctly, for Transformation, the song above, i used 2 signals: a line in directly into my tx-6, and the CM-15 to pick up the room and my amp (i placed it 1 foot away from the 12th fret of my guitar and my amp was about 3 feet behind me).
for some of my other pieces, like Meltdown, i did something very similar but i added the ribbon mic about 2in from the very far left side of my amp. so thats 3 guitar signals! kind of overkill maybe but i find that this final tone of all 3 signals blended sounds the most natural and full.
Nice:) year blending sounds is a geat. I have an old reel tape recorder with built in amp and speakers which sound beautiful with synths. I try to capture their sound with 2 boundary-mics and add it to the dry synth signal. I also like layering, a lot, and would love to practice to do it inside op1 with overdubbing. But it‘s a oneshot to nail the right amount of recording volume for every sound, and I’m not there yet. Sometimes it feels right in the moment, and on the other day, you feel like to change it again, or, with a distance you see that some sounds where too loud in contrast to the others.
The sync to outsource is a nice one. Also the bouncing. In my case of OG-1 it’s only mono bouncing though, but you can bounce left and right channel each on track 1 & 2, hard panned left right and have 2 tracks to go on. Your new composition could be rebounced with Track 1&2 again, in the next loop, for instance. Or, in case of OP1 field you could use that to have half of your stereo-bounced „group“ on track 1 and another on Track 2, so although you baked sounds unchangably together, you could at least adjust volume of the two groups.
how did you do those nice chiptune-arpreggios, beginning at 3:49 in „Transformation“?
Appearently I use an old c64 as a synth, but haven’t found a proper Programm or tracker to build them.
a process i have been going for over the past couple years is just straight linear song creation. i used to start off with what felt like the “main piece” of the song, making a 8/16 bar loop and then working backwards from there. then i got an sp404, then a while later an ep133, and just recently the op-1f. this linear writing process has worked super well for me with all of these pieces of gear because working linearly is simply the least confusing way (for me) to approach these three very different systems between the three pieces of gear. i feel like its one of those processes that pushes me to actual finish tunes too because im thinking about how things flow together more.
so with the op-1f, i dont keep extra copies of tape anywhere. i dont collapse tracks together very often, i also dont record to the master album. if i’m overdubbing i just lift that single section of tape and replace it so i can “undo” if necessary but thats about the only level of failsafety i implement. ive found that there is absolutely no way ill remember what random slices of tape are for if i come back to a project on a different day, so i do my best to keep the same things on the same tracks for the most part (drums/percs on 1, chords on 2, leads on 3, bass on 4).
when im talking about working backwards that was when i was working in Ableton or with a tracker like the M8 or the Polyend Tracker, not the op-1f or ep133.
backwards probably isnt even the right way to say it, i guess i used to start with the middle of the song and then figure out a start and and ending once i liked the middle. i made pretty repetitive music using this method.
?