Teenage Engineering

Moe_Zambeek

I've been - for some reason - looking at Teenage Engineering stuff lately. Started with the pocket operators then saw the OP-1 and it looks like lots of fun even if you're not a synth / sample / electronic instrument expert. Which I'm definitely not

I thought it might a good little toy for mucking around with and creating little tracks to layer over and build into songs.

Are there any owners on tFB? Are there any similar devices that are less spendy?

earwighoney

I'd be more inclined to go for the Critter & Guitari Organelle, which is a fair chunk less and IMO seems to be more capable of making more interesting sounds. 

Moe_Zambeek

Good call - forgot about that but the Knobs demo was great!

bean7

I have one - I know nothing about synths etc but had play around with one in a shop when on holiday and couldn't leave without one. As it happens its fantastic for travelling, killing time on the plane/train etc - a large part of the experience is the 4 track tape recorder flow, where you can get pretty creative making loops and riffs or whatever, and then copy the tracks to your computer later on to do whatever else you think of in a full DAW etc. Its expensive but not surprising considering the quality and design of it.

peaches

I answered another thread about one yesterday on another forum, so I'll say the same here. I had an OP-1 for a while, got one stupidly cheap in the states. 

It really is a lot of fun, but the analogy of people relating it to Apple's products is super accurate. It's well made, feels great and looks fantastic, the interface is so fun to use, especially with the neat graphics. It's also very expensive and very restrictive, albeit in a very creative way. Totally Apple. 

I liked it a lot, but ultimately it wasn't for me. I wasn't using the recording/sampling features particularly, and there are better synths out there for the other things. The organelle looks amazing, and maybe does have better sounding synth engines, but I don't believe it has the built in recording studio, and I'm not sure it samples either. You have to ask yourself if you want that stuff too! 

I agree that that the OP-1 is a very cool all in one for travelling.