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second hand or sale OP1 or Tenori-on in New York? (want!)


uiua_audiovisi

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I've just started on a long international travelling holiday and have realised i miss my synthesizers, so want to buy a portable synth/sequencer like Tenori-on or OP-1 to satisfy the synthy urges.

Any ideas of where a good place to pick one up in New York would be? Or is anyone who lives there looking to sell one?

I'll be staying in Brooklyn between 16 and 27 Dec - would appreciate any advice (or offers)! :-)

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I say go for a Tenori-on if you can find the right price.

Not only can you load samples and use it as an external sequencer, it also acts as a sound module where many short plinky tones can actually be sustained by looping for chords, drones, etc. I didn't see this documented, but I figured it out by tinkering. That makes it a whole lot more useful than the crappy demos on YouTube would have you believe. I hooked it to my Evolver and X-station and had a good old time dorking around.

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Quote Originally Posted by Citizen Klaus View Post
Please post impressions. I'm rather curious about that little beast.
I have one. Some people find the synth engines to be limited, but I like the sounds. The Endless sequencer comes with a bunch of "patterns" - each pattern imposes a certain rhythm on the notes that you enter, and these vary from simple to surprisingly complex. The chord memory trick is well explained in the Making Tracks YouTube video, but getting the hang of it has been a challenge for me. The Finger sequencer is fun, but editing is a bit weird because the grid is so small, due the screen real estate taken up by the two nerds (or monkeys if you're in Drum mode).

It doesn't really work like other sequencing units though, in that once you enter a new sequence in Endless, the old one is gone. The only way to "save" your sequence is to record it to Tape, and then its just the audio that gets recorded. You have up to 6 min. of stereo audio on your Tape. If your composition is longer than that, you'll have to transfer your up-to-6 min. passage of music to computer and start recording all over again with the next passage of your masterpiece. This and other quirks annoy some users.

Thought about picking up an OP-Lab to interface with other gear, but read that lots of users are getting on fine with an iConnectMIDI.
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Quote Originally Posted by girevik View Post
I have one. Some people find the synth engines to be limited, but I like the sounds. The Endless sequencer comes with a bunch of "patterns" - each pattern imposes a certain rhythm on the notes that you enter, and these vary from simple to surprisingly complex. The chord memory trick is well explained in the Making Tracks YouTube video, but getting the hang of it has been a challenge for me. The Finger sequencer is fun, but editing is a bit weird because the grid is so small, due the screen real estate taken up by the two nerds (or monkeys if you're in Drum mode).

It doesn't really work like other sequencing units though, in that once you enter a new sequence in Endless, the old one is gone. The only way to "save" your sequence is to record it to Tape, and then its just the audio that gets recorded. You have up to 6 min. of stereo audio on your Tape. If your composition is longer than that, you'll have to transfer your up-to-6 min. passage of music to computer and start recording all over again with the next passage of your masterpiece. This and other quirks annoy some users.

Thought about picking up an OP-Lab to interface with other gear, but read that lots of users are getting on fine with an iConnectMIDI.
That's a good point about the sequencers; thanks. I'm always interested in novel or generative sequencing techniques, and the OP-1's Tombola sequencer really caught my eye. But deliberate limitation does seem to be the OP-1's defining trait...

How's the Cluster module? Is it just a basic supersaw affair, or can you get some nice warbling drones out of it?

One of the awkward things about the OP-1 is that, while there are a few good demos of the sequencers available on Vimeo and such, nobody's really put together a good overview of the oscillator modules. And the manual seems to be pretty intentionally obtuse when it comes to describing what they actually do.
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Quote Originally Posted by Citizen Klaus View Post
That's a good point about the sequencers; thanks. I'm always interested in novel or generative sequencing techniques, and the OP-1's Tombola sequencer really caught my eye. But deliberate limitation does seem to be the OP-1's defining trait...

How's the Cluster module? Is it just a basic supersaw affair, or can you get some nice warbling drones out of it?

One of the awkward things about the OP-1 is that, while there are a few good demos of the sequencers available on Vimeo and such, nobody's really put together a good overview of the oscillator modules. And the manual seems to be pretty intentionally obtuse when it comes to describing what they actually do.
iceritchie from the ohpeewon.com forum has a video overview of the OP-1 synth engines:


iceritchie also created a website meant to be a one-stop information resource on the OP-1. It includes his own Quick Reference Guide, which fills in some details missing from the official manual, like the parameters for the various synth engines: http://www.go-p1.net/

I've made some attempts to create a nice ambient drone patch, but haven't succeeded yet because I suck at synth programming. I didn't focus on Cluster in my efforts. Fortunately for those of us who are slower learners, some of the denizens of ohpeewon have volunteered to submit more "exercises" (like the patch programming exercises in the official manual), including a drone patch. There's an excellent ambient track featuring Cluster and the Tombola sequencer on this thread - scroll to mattleaf's Soundcloud track:
http://ohpeewon.com/discussion/comme...#Comment_14557

A detailed description of the Cluster engine:
http://op-101.blogspot.com.au/2011/0...scription.html
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