Trick to record “live” multitracks from OP-Z using MIDI

I love the OP-Z. I men, I really love it. But I don’t like recording it into a DAW.

There are two common ways to do this:

  1. Record a stereo mix straight from the OP-Z.
  2. Mute all but one track, then record that track all the way through. Repeat for all tracks.

The second one gets the job done, but if you have any live element to your song, you have to repeat it for all 8 tracks. That’s fine, but not everything is repeatable.

My New Improved™ way uses MIDI. Record the stereo mix as before, but at the same time, record midi from all tracks. You must also record the “meta” tracks: FX, tape, master, and punch-in. You’ll end up with 13 midi tracks (or 14 if you record the Component track).

The neat part about the OP-Z is that almost everything is recorded to MIDI. Even the buttons you press on the tape track are recorded.

Then, just play back the midi for, say, the kick track (with the meta tracks also enabled), sending it to the OP-Z. The OP-Z will play back the kick track, with all your live tweaks intact, and you can record it.

Caveats: p-locks are not recorded. So, if you crank up the delay on the last kick of the bar, that won’t be recorded. But punch-in effects are recorded, as are Master Track changes etc.

You also have to make sure midi is getting sent to and from the OP-Z to the correct channels, but that can be set once and saved as a template.

Tested in both Ableton and Cubasis. Maybe I should make a video of this?

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Yeah, this is the main method I used to record the opz. And I actually just did a mini-series on it a few weeks ago.

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Part 2:

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I don’t know how feasible this would be, but could the op-z have more than two digital outputs(Currently L+R) with a firmware update? Could it send 8 channels of digital audio over usb?

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This is something a lot of us have been asking for. Technically, it should be feasible with a firmware update; however, I doubt the OP-Z has enough processing power to do so. It already struggles sometimes with doing the single L/R over usb, and still sometimes has voice stealing issues.

Edit: I’d be happy if we could even separate the drum and synth bus and record two stereo pairs. But again, processing power might be the limiting factor.

Davnak thanks for sharing those vids! Super useful!

Very nice!

Some kind of Teenage Overbridge would be great, but it doesn’t seem likely.

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Agreed

Also, for those interested, I made my Ableton Template available for download at my website: http://davnak.com/samplepacks

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nice hack Mistercharlie