I’d be really interested to know your different techniques of getting your work off the OPZ and into a DAW to finish it. Especially using chained patterns.
I’m trying to get some chained patterns recorded out to my DAW (Cubase.) Track by track.
In the past I’ve saved out single patterns by muting the audio I don’t want and recording each instrument separately. Syncing the OPZ to Cubase via midi sync/clock works well.
However, chained patterns create a world of confusion as I need to go through each pattern of the chain and mute all the tracks I don’t want to record for each instrument- a major headache.
What about playing it through (all unmuted) and recording the MIDI onto seperate channels in the computer.
Then play one MIDI channel at a time (or maybe including FX channels if necessary) back to the OP-Z and record the audio.
I’ve recorded the multitrack MIDI so can say that works well, but I haven’t tried multitracking the audio that way. It does seem more practical since the audio interface updates.
I’ve tried this but I can’t get the OPz to play a series of chained patterns all the way through into Cubase - I have a weird glitch where it will play the first pattern, then move onto the second pattern, but as it does this all the other patterns in the chain disappear.
The only way around this was to manually change the patterns myself as the OPz was playing.
I feel you. I think it would be a great addition to the op-z to have a “solo” function in the mixer that sticks across patterns.
This enable us to just solo one track and record the whole chain without messing around with all the mute-settings in all patterns.
To simplify the process of mixing/mastering op-z projects in a DAW it would be great to have a way to export/bounce individual tracks for a full pattern chain (=song).
Possible solutions:
Add a “solo” button to the mixer that sticks across patterns (would also be very cool for live performances). This way we could simply solo a track and play the full pattern chain while recording it via USB in the DAW. Right now it is a hassle to mute all tracks except the one we want to bounce and revert all patterns to the previous mute state.
Adding multitrack capabilities to the USB audio so that op-z shows up as a multichannel interface. This would super-cool as we could record all tracks in a single go, but would probably a bit harder to implement
Yeah I’d imagine option 2 would be a tricky one, probably needing loads more memory than the Opz has.
Its frustrating for me as release my music and need to have it in a DAW to finish it - even just a master solo across all the chained patterns would be a big help.
The Digitakt has separate Global Mute and Pattern Mute functions. I can see it being confusing on the OP-Z but it could definitely work, especially if they make it a global setting rather than an option.
I would like to see a bounce track mode. The op-z should play the chain you program but with mutes applied.
So the op-z should mute all tracks except track one, then it should play a click (for syncing purpose) followed by the the entire chain and one empty pattern for reverb and echo tails at the end.
Then the op-z should mute all tracks except track two, then play a click followed by the entire chain.
Then continue to repeat this for all tracks.
This way exporting a song requires you to boot up the op-z, enter export mode and program the chain, hit record on your recorder and hit play on the op-z. Then wait for it to finish, chop the recording up and sync everything by using the clicks.
The OPZ can bounce 10 second tracks - I’m wondering if it is only 10 seconds because of limited space? How about an external module that acts like an SD card that you could bounce tracks to? A universal mute would also help with this.
