OP1 Workflow to get all overdubs separately for mixing

OP-1
1

Hey guys, new OP1 user and on the forum here.

I have figured out (and tested) a way to add as many layers as you want on the OP1 itself and being able to retrieve them in post for mixing.

I may do a more detailed explanation or tutorial video if anyone is interested, but here goes the short version of it:

  1. set a X-bar loop and record one element per tape track.
  2. lift all tracks and drop twice
  3. set x-bar loop in newly created tape section
  4. overdub another element on each track.
  5. repeat if necessary.
  6. get tapes from op1 and note the tempo.
  7. in your daw of choice, cut two adjacent x-bar loops from one of the tracks and stack them one on top of the other
  8. phase invert one of them and you should get only the overdub.

example:

  1. 4 bar piano chords on track1
  2. lift , drop drop, loop second part
  3. 4 bar drum overdub.
  4. get tapes and drop them in the daw on tempo
  5. separate the two loops and put them one on top of the other. (we should have piano loop on one track and same piano+drums on the other track)
  6. phase invert one of them and you should hear just the drums.
  7. profit.

hope this helps somebody.
Cheers

3 Likes
2

Great, I will be super interested if you can make a simple video instruction how to achieve that.

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3

Thats cool. Haven’t thought of doing that.
Is the result clean?

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4

I’ve tried it and works pretty well. in Ableton, it may require a few samples of track delay for phase cancellation.

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5

Exactly. It does require a few samples of track delay. I didn’t know why that is. Maybe the DAW’s idea of what 89.1 bpm is is ever so slightly different from OP1’s idea.

I intend on making a demonstration video after messing about with this technique a bit more.

6

That’s pretty ingenious!
Props!

7

Thanks for the tip!

8

I’d be pretty surprised if this works in general, because some sort of saturation/limiting must be happening in the overdubbing process (otherwise: you could keep overdubbing again and again and eventually the summed level of the signal would overflow/clip).

This means overdubbing can’t simply be adding the existing+new signals, it must (in some cases anyway) perform some amount of re-scaling of the volumes, meaning that this trick won’t work in general.

(It’s possible they have enough headroom internally to avoid having to do this for a while, I guess it depends on how hot you’re hitting the tape.)

Anyway that’s a really clever trick, I’m surprised it works! :slight_smile:

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9

I did a quick test in Cubase and it worked.

Thanks!

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