r/pocketoperators

The PO33 is still my favorite to make dnb on. It so easy and just too good. Chopped drums, Chopped balkan choir sample, and added bass.

I wanted to share the mobile set-up I’ve been working on lately. I’m still sorting out the connections, but the Tonic runs things, and i picked up a used J-6 for a good price specifically so it can take the sync signal from the pocket operators, and have it sequence chords for the FM-1 via midi. I will likely not pull out the Bastl B Drum very often, but it does look good next to the Dude mixer, and I wanted to mess with the sync options for it. A smaller variation of this set-up is just the Tonic, Sub, and Kaos Pad running into the zoom recorder. so far it‘s a lot of fun, and admittedly a bit of a rabbit hole I went down with the pocket operators. I thought you folks might enjoy. Cheers!

Jam or no jam? PO-12, PO-14, PO-16 through a 12ch mixer with some onboard verb, in addition to TKOG Mini Glitch comin in hot. Easy, simple, vibes this morning before my first couples therapy sesh with the missus. Wish me luck, friends…

You can play a PO-14 in your browser:
https://www.iscanet.com/music/pocket-tutorial/po-14-sub/

Write a pattern, chain it, hear it. It's synthesised in the browser... not recordings of the hardware, and not meant to be a full simulator.

It's part of a set of guides I've been writing for all nine POs, mostly because I kept forgetting my own units' button combos and got tired of scrubbing through videos to find one.

Made a bit of a silly one.

I started with sampling some kids relaxation music that my daughter listens to on Spotify (which I'm fairly convinced is AI generated) and chop sampled the opening song.

Added some drums and bits I found online including a couple of vocal samples and that was about it.

All in all it came together quite quickly.

Been working on this on and off for a few days.

Has a couple of obscure samples in it:

Bassy drum bit: Budda Fly Away by Shape of Broad Minds

First vocal chop: Dream Catcher by Pinc Louds.

Found a nice salsa piano sample that worked well - and this was the end result.

As a bonus it also seems to pace quite nicely to The Cat In The Hat, so that's fun.

Enjoy.

Can you guess the sample? 👀 (you might get it if you’ve been to the movies lately)

I’m currently working on a case for the Teenage Engineering PO-33 KO! 🎛️
What do you guys think of the current design? I’d love to hear your feedback and any suggestions for improvement!

I saw a post recently of a browser tool someone made to quickly load samples so that they can be imported onto their PO-33. I've been using a similar tool that I built for a while, but seeing that kicked my butt into actually making it accessible for other people since I think it has some pretty cool features that really help to save precious sample space on your Pocket Operator.

You can download it from the releases page here, just choose the right version for your OS:

https://github.com/andreaskinga-lgtm/POTool

The general idea is that this lets you create a 'Project' for each of your drum kits, and combine them all into a single audio file that you can load into your PO in a one go. That way, it can be sliced up on the PO and use the smallest amount of space possible for each of your kits. If you've ever tried to individually load samples onto the PO-33 you know that doing it like that wastes a TON of space.

The overall flow is:

1. Import your samples - either to each pad individually or from a file with multiple samples inside. You can manually slice, auto slice, or even use the built in slice points from OP1 samples (like you can find on OP1.fun)
2. Customize your pads. You can drag them around to adjust their order, change their volume, playback speed/pitch, and even merge them together (To do things like have a mixed bass drum + high hat sound on a single pad to allow you to save space for other simultaneous sounds when making a beat)
3. Save your project so that you can keep the kit exactly as you have it set up - or even open it later to modify it
4. Plug in your PO to the computer, start recording on one of your drum pad slots, and then click the play button to play the entire sequence of your pads into the PO. Ideally, the PO will then auto slice the samples onto the pads for you (Unfortunately I find I usually have to do some tweaking after the import depending on how distinct each transient is)
5. If you want, you can even export the sounds into a single WAV file so that you can have an easy library of drum kits on the go with you. I just have a folder on my phone with a ton of them so if I ever want to swap something out I can easily.

I've mostly tested this on my Mac because that's what I generally use for programming, but I've also done some basic testing on my PC to make sure it works there as well. Linux users you're on your own for now but if you have issues let me know and maybe I'll install a linux partition on my PC to do some proper testing. The code is all hosted on github so feel free to look it over before you download.

I've (almost entirely) used claude to build this, but I am a programmer by trade so if you find any issues I should actually be able to understand and fix them properly. Electron apps are a little new to me but I have plenty of experience in react-native so this wasn't anything crazy new to me.

Hope you all enjoy and if you have any questions/concerns or feature suggestions let me know!

I started out very early with the chords and drums, now I have the rest of the month to add melody, improve the mix, and some more ear candy 🫠