Gadgetory

hi I'm Russell Brandon and this is the pocket operator 14 from teenage engineering it's a tiny cheap base so nathan wrote about this on a site awhile ago it's just a tiny cheap bass 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 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 gonna do with all the melodies are programmed in 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 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 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 bass line from Billie Jean so 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 if I want to change this note to something much higher I just turn the style so now it's an octave higher than what's 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 I'll be where I'll be always and see the baseline starts to change but it's better because it's well anyway it's different because its effect what's changing is that I'm punching and effects or punching them 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 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 it 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