Hi, I’m thinking of buying an OP-Z but have a few questions if someone can answer?
With a drum track, can you pan individual samples, or only the whole kit?
Can you have independent track lengths? If not is there a workaround using step components?
Can you bounce individual tracks to wav for mixing, or can you only manually track it out?
Can you program everything, including step components, without a screen, or is a screen essential?
Thanks
HO
Yes, yes, no, yes.
@Kja has your answers.
I’m not sure you can pan individual samples, but you can pan individual steps. You can also use LFOs for panning tracks.
On the last question I found myself quite reliant on the app at first but much less so now. I still use it when picking or manipulating synths or sampling when writing, but now for performance I rarely need it which is very nice.
Nearly a year of op-z and I’m very happy with it.
Thanks @Kja and @dhunterrr,
Could someone double check if you can pan individual sounds within kits please?
If you use the LFO, does it affect the whole kit, or can you choose which sounds are effected?
Was that a yes to independent track lengths (a la electron units), or yes to there being a workaround using step components?
Also, are all samples, kits, sounds and synth mono?
Thanks,
HO
Yes it’s all mono, no you can’t pan individual instruments in a kit. You can change the panning of each step in a sequence, which often times creates the same effect though.
You need to rethink what a kit is on the OP-Z. It’s a single wav file that has had up to 25 separate samples combined into it. The OP-Z then automatically slices that single sample up and applies each sound to a key to be triggered. But your still only ever triggering that one long wav file when you press a key, each key is just altering where in the long sample playback starts.
…and stops, and whether it loops and how, and whether it plays forward or backward. But other than that, absolutely.
Cool thanks, yep totally get how the drum sections work, standard sample chains stuff. I just wondered if you could pan per sound. Would be pretty simple to implement. But nice you can automate it at least.
So each track can definitely have independent length to create cool polyrhythms? I haven’t seen this anywhere. That’s really cool.
Not only that, it’s really easy to do. I change the track length on the fly as a performance tool. And when I say “performance,” I mean “playing alone at my desk.”
I also like to change the master channel (the key-change channel) to an odd number of steps, so it slowly acts on the patterns differently over time.
Easy to have tracks of different length plus there is a step component to pulse steps so they hang and repeat or hold a number of times you set. I’ve only used it once with some percussion, would love to more because it is wild!
Why would you want to pan the sounds if you are not sequencing them? Are you gonna play then in real time or something? Because the keys suck…
Other machines are setup differently, for example you create/edit a kit and assign a pan position to each sample in the kit. Then you record your drum pattern and the samples are heard in the pan position you defined in the kit, not per step.
It would be beneficial if the OP-Z could do this.
What do you mean? I am going to sequence them. I’m interested in the panning situation in terms of the mix.
Does anyone know, using audio over USB-C with a new iPad, can you easily sample from the OP-Z into an app like beatmaker 3? It looks like it’s plug and play and should show up as an audio input in BM3. Has anyone tried it?
It works really well with BM3. You can midi sync them, and record loops easily into the BM3 sampler. The midi sync is tight af.
I prefer it over recording into Ableton.
You can…each sample is a track…just set the tracks pan… Or if you want multiple sounds in one track just set the pan to each sound and copy and paste that sound where you want it in the sequence… Both are very easy.
Maybe some of this is getting lost in terminology.
If we are talking drum tracks as @henryo originally asked e.g. track 3 Percussion you can only assign panning to the whole track and when you place a shaker sound on a step you can then tweak the panning for that step, if you had a both a shaker and a high hat sound on that step they would both be panned identically. You cannot just press the shaker button and pre-pan any step that would be contain shaker to a certain pan setting and then press
Panning is set globally for the track, but individual steps can be changed by holding down a press on the step and tweaking the yellow dial. Panning is not set on a “per sound” eg. shaker/high hat/cymbal as with some other drum machines.
It also depends how you construct your drums and use tracks. There are 4 drum tracks so you could consider that a “kit” with 24 sounds per track totalling 96 available sounds, and pan is set per track, so 4 different pan positions without editing individual steps.
On the other hand some people put all their drum sounds on one track so a ‘kit’ is only one track, with only one pan position without editing individual steps.
There is also an LFO per track which can be assigned to modulate pan and can be useful to introduce some panning movements.
Essentially, as @Kja says it is quite easy to play with panning, but does have a limitation, and it is different to other drum machines.
Hope that helps @henryo
Yes thanks @dhunterrr this what I thought you guys meant… individual drum sounds within an OP-Z track can’t be panned, unless p-locked into the sequence.
A note on the original question of whether you can do things without a screen in case that’s a big concern impacting the purchase decision. Or for anyone else reading, thinking the same thing.
I’ve only had my OP-Z for a few weeks so still definitely learning (I have an OP-1 so it’s not ALL totally abstract but it’s still a steep curve), and I have to say, I’ve found NOT connecting to a screen a far better and far more rewarding way to learn.
With the screen, you can’t help but rely on the visual input. That sounds obvious I know, but as in, you don’t develop any muscle memory other than navigating to each function page (master, tape, tracks etc). Once there, you naturally do/watch everything through the screen.
I quickly realised I was becoming too reliant on it and unable to remember where things were on each page without it. It’s an incredibly complex, well designed navigation system once you get your head around it. But with a screen, you only really need to operate at the very top, never drilling down into the secondary pages.
One of the reasons I got it in the first place, as with the OP-1, was its tiny, self contained form factor (I literally have no other music production equipment other than some real instruments), and suddenly HAVING to have an iPhone or iPad was breaking that minimalist dream.
So i turned it off and have not used the screen again, to force myself to work solely from the leds - their colour, the brightness, their movement etc. It was actually surprisingly fast to get to grips with and ultimately gives far more ‘feel’ to using the device than reading the information.
You learn to listen to the sound rather than ‘look’ at it. Is the delay at exactly 25% and the reverb at exactly 75% like you wanted? No idea, but it sounds good so it’s working!
Removing the screen removes most of the precision that comes with computerised music production, or that you could achieve with a DAW. You can easily quantise, step sequence etc and often see when things are at dead on 0%, 50%, 100%, but other than that, it’s all about the feels! It turns it into far more of an instrument you PLAY, than some software that you USE.
So if the lack of screen is a deciding factor, I’d say go for it, it’s a LOT of fun to navigate almost entirely with your ears and if it proves unsatisfactory, you can always turn the phone on - it’s still a pretty minimal setup after all!
Hope this is helpful insight to you or anyone else facing the same conundrum. Good luck and have fun!
Love this! Thanks
doesn’t work for me at all, i think my opz is fucked though when it comes to midi never been able to get midi to work on it, just use it for audio