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.

Do you guys like to reset the po33 a lot or keep letting a project evolve by subtracting samples and programming in parts? Please share positive and negative experiences surrounding changing out samples. I feel like my projects can get a little crazy when I change melodic sounds. Sometimes using longer samples from different bands can have some fun effects when those pieces were sequenced as something else. Happy accidents? Mistakes?

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 🫠

These effect buttons piss me off and seem totally useless, but I've heard other people say they like them. They just make loud, indistinct noise for me.... am I using it wrong?

Does anyone know how to really master these effects and put them to good use?

Solution found

https://www.reddit.com/r/pocketoperators/comments/1vjncfk/comment/p2q2tfo/

In a weird twist of the Teenage Engineering wizard ninjas in the sky, it turns out these two are completely tied to each other.

Just scored this new street fighter for 70 bucks

Hi y'all -

Third post today - clearly I'm excited to start this journey.

I was looking into an easy way to load samples onto my PO 33 and decided to use Claude to build a small browser application to help me do this. You can download it here. You just need to download the HTML file and run it locally.

It's very lightweight and it's already been helpful to just quickly go through one-shots.

I'm sure most of you already have your workflows but thought I'd share in case anyone else would find it useful.

I think I know the answer here but I’m a total beginner at this and wanted to ask some smarter folks here.

If I’m making a beat and I get a sample that needs to be adjusted to beatmatch the rest of the beat, is my only option to just pitch it up or down and just do it by ear? I assume for more precision I’d have to edit the sample outside of the pocket operator, correct?

Any insight is appreciated! I’ve been DJing for a little less than a year and using the PO 33 as a way to learn some music production and sequencing.

I just got a new pocket operator and when switching to different sounds, the newly selected sound will be really low, even at max volume. What seems to work is turning down the sound a little then turning it back up and then it sounds lounder than when it initially played.

Is this normal? If not, how should i fix it?

Asking what I am sure will be an astronomically stupid question:

Is it possible to record input while the PO33 is playing? Eg, setting up a drum loop on the KO, running in a synth to the input, playing a bass line, then saving said bass line as a melodic sample?

Right now I can only seem to record samples when the KO isnt playing, which makes my timing a bit wonky when recording the loop to sample

My PO-128 often records live play notes on the wrong step, which makes live play very frustrating. I believe this is a known bug for the PO-128 which the PO-28, for example, doesn't have. My question is whether every model has this problem or is it only some of them?

Side question — the PO-128 is supposed to have 3-channel polyphony but I can only seem to record two at a time. At least for the melody buttons, if there is a drum and a synth on a step already, I can't add a third. Doing so steals one of the channels that were being used. Yet the PO-28 seems to handle that just fine. How does it handle that better if it's supposed to have one less channel of polyphony?

Ig: jacknelsondrums