Playing with Teenage Engineering’s pocket synth

Playing with Teenage Engineering's pocket synth

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Playing with Teenage Engineering’s pocket synth”.
Hi i’m russell brandum, and this is the pocket operator 14 from teenage engineering. It’S a tiny, cheap bass. Synth. So nathan wrote about this on a site a while ago. It’S just a tiny, cheap base. Synth this one. I think everything together with shipping.

It was like 80 bucks, so i just bought it. They didn’t send me this or anything uh and i’ve been playing around with it for a couple weeks. It’S probably my favorite object that i own right. Now you only get sort of 16 and change buttons. I guess 23 buttons and that determines kind of everything you’re gon na do with it all the melodies are programmed in advance, so you can play it like a traditional instrument, but it’s really you’re sort of not supposed to the way it works. Is you program the melodies in you hit a button and you turn this knob and it says okay, do i want that to be a c, or do i want to be a d and you sort of turn the knob, which is really awkward and kind of Takes a while, but the plus side is once you have it programmed in it’ll just play over and over again, and you can sort of worry about other things so right now, i’ve got it programmed to play the baseline from billie jean.

Playing with Teenage Engineering's pocket synth

This is what it looks like when it’s working. You know i’ve done all the grunt work of programming it in uh. You know you can see what that’s like i’ll just put in right mode and uh. If i want to change this note to something much higher, i just turn the style. So now it’s an octave higher than it was before you see it’s not really. A satisfying way to you know change the notes you have to sort of have in mind in advance what you want, but the effects are much more immediate. So if i want to add distortion in that same note, i can just and see the the baseline starts to change, but it’s better because it’s well anyway, it’s different because it’s effects what’s changing is that i’m punching in effects or punching them out. There’S this submarine visualization in front of everything, so each torpedo, that’s getting shot out is a beat and the different machines are different effects.

Playing with Teenage Engineering's pocket synth

So he’s running between the different machines to sort of put in the effects that i’ve already punched in. I have no idea what is going on, so the result is when you’re playing it mostly. What you’re doing is you’re punching in effects, which is a very different way to think about music and sort of performance, and it’s a way that has a lot more to do with how popular music works right now, when you hear a particularly sort of rousing or Affecting part of a pop song, it’s generally because some new instruments coming in they’re putting in some effect you know a bass drop. That’S that’s! What a bass drop is that’s sort of hard to do in software i mean that’s generally how people do it, but it’s very difficult to get that sense of a performance generally you’re sort of arranging these effects in advance.

You have to sort of know what you’re going for before you do it, whereas you know having a little guy like this lets, you really get into it and feel it in a sort of much more visceral way. So i don’t know i like it and i’ve had a lot of fun with it. You .