Quick look for Sacramento producers: a notable piece of gear at Namm 2010

Another year, another ton of good gear displayed at the NAMM show. Something that I always like to look for when this show comes around are the less known companies and what interesting things they come out with. It seems that these companies are a little more daring and can sometimes break into an aspect of hardware missed by some of the larger companies (roland, korg, yamaha, etc.).
The piece of gear this year that gets my nod is a piece of gear that I’ve actually been following for some time by a great team in Sweden. No, it’s not Elektron (who I think will probably be demoing a new sampler in the near future at one of the upcoming shows). The company is ‘teenage engineering’ and the great gadget coming out sometime this coming year is the OP-1.
The OP-1 comes with everything you can think of. Sampler, keyboard, sequencer, controller, efx, great interface, color coding so that you don’t get confused when you’re looking in a hurry during a set, and a whole lot more.
One of the main features demoed at NAMM was the newly announced tape recorder function. “It instantly lets you record anything you do on the OP-1 to any track of the built-in Tape feature. Record your sound tweaks or beats in real-time. Change speed during recording, or record backwards. Split, lift and join. Make a loop or record a section with Tape Step Recording. You have twelve minutes recording time in normal tape speed and 4 tracks to put your magic on.

Turn on Beat Matching to sync tape speed to the internal sequencer. When you change the tape speed the sequenced tempo follows but the pitch of the sound is constant. This is great for creating beats on multiple tracks with different pitch.”

In addition to recording live and mixing it up with the tape recorder function, you can connect a computer to the mini USB port on the OP-1 and the OP-1 shows up as a mass storage device. Ready for you to drag and drop audio files between your computer and the OP-1. The 4 tape tracks are available as well as sampled waveforms for you to manipulate. No additional software or drivers required!

This synth baddy comes with everything you’re looking for in a synth these days. Portability for the live users, power and depth for studio users, and (probably one of the coolest features *not made public yet*) the ability to sync up with other OP-1 users for a jam session via WI-FI!!! I, for one, can’t wait for the day when all my gear can talk to each other without me stringing multiple MIDI cables everywhere.

The price, from all reports on the website, is looking to be under $1000, which is very doable when you look at everything you’re getting with this synth. BETA models will be shipping out soon, and I believe teenage engineering will be shipping in late summer/early fall (if everything goes smoothly).

For more information on the OP-1, go to ‘http://teenageengineering.com/products/op-1/’

teenage enginering’s youtube

Some notable mentions for gear that I’ve found about at this NAMM: Allen & Heath Launches the ZED-10 and ZED-10FX Mini Mixers, Akai iPhone keyboard and app (connect you iPhone/iTouch to a freaking keyboard!), keyboard mopho by Dave Smith.