It’s what a lot of musicians wished for – especially judging by all the renders you were making. But the reality looks and works better than what you imagined: the OP-XY is a more mature OP-Z follow-up with a rich complement of sequencing features. And it’s all in gorgeous black and monochrome.
The only bad news here, just to skip straight to the sticker shock: this beauty is a real luxury item, at EUR 2299.
For all their design chops, the first impression is that this is the biggest visual statement Teenage Engineering has made since the OP-1. This thing just looks gorgeous. And it’s what a lot of OP-Z fans wanted: keep the svelte candybar design of the OP-Z, add more buttons so it’s more usable, and put a display on it because “the iPhone is the display” doesn’t really sound like a good idea any more now that it’s 2024.
Like other hardware at the moment, the OP-XY benefits from enhanced embedded computation. It’s a dual-CPU platform that the Teenagers say allowed them to make a “no-compromise” instrument with a “fully rebuilt” sequencer, sampler, and synth engine.
And now it has some other major additions:
- Built-in CV, so this can be a slimline pairing with your modular or analog gear.
- Effects sends.
- New “Best-in-class” DAC (and those are also getting more accessible to makers, so why not?)
- High-res grayscale display
It looks like they’ve put a ton of work into the sequencer – so while we have a bunch of new mobile devices with multi-function capabilities, it seems the Teenagers are aiming for sequencing territory specifically. They’ve added “punch-in FX,” live variations, randomization for note timing, velocity, and pitch, live automation, and something they call “brain” for chord progressions.
Everyone who knows Teenage Engineering’s Swedish design phase might forget that the original lineage of this company is with the earliest days of Elektron. So this, to me, really feels like a return to form in that territory. I was even all set to complain about the lack of tuning support, but – yeah, they included tuning support, too. And the ability to run different sequencer lanes at different speeds.
It’s great to see clever sequencing ideas baked right in – like new triggers:
- pulse (repeat) and hold functions that work without progressing the sequence
- multiply (ratcheting sort of effect)
- velocity
- ramp up, down
- random
- portamento
- bend
- tonality (by interval)
- jump
- skip parameter, step component, trigger
And it’s got jacks: in, out, midi/sync, and midi, CV/gate, audio in, aux audio, plus USB-C.
To anyone who complained about Teenage Engineering designs being toys, this is a machine that is no-compromise in its brains, not just its looks. And ironically, that comes at a time when most of the industry is, frankly, making some compromises on the brains to reach a mass market.
It’s still weird, though – don’t worry about that. Think “performance gyroscope” for modulation and effects and some fun dot matrix displays and animations, for starters.
These specs – nice:
8 unique synth engines
new drum sampler
multisampler
synth sampler
4 filter types
24-voice multitimbral synthesis
players per track
instant sampling
6 built-in FX
master eq
master saturator
master compressor and limiter
stereo signal path
brain™ – intelligent transposer
24 punch-in FX™ for performance
creative tape looper
2 sequenceable built-in FX slots
midi channels selectable per track
10 000+ project files with version history
16-track, 64-step step sequencer with 4 pages
powerful step components
9 patterns per track, 99 scenes
song mode with 9 songs per project
presets per pattern
10 grooves for creative swing
usb-c audio/midi host and device
audio-out
a multi-out jack, for cv, midi, audio and sync out
midi-in
audio-in
built-in speaker
built-in mic
smooth parameter locks
1920 PPQN
pressure sensitive pitchbend
bluetooth le midi
microtonal tuning
performance gyroscope
It’s just weird to see them suddenly using German for the website copy instead of their usual Japanese, but maybe that’s just so you know this isn’t a tie-in with Jpop boy band XY. (Well, not yet, anyway.)
It’s damn pricey. But it’s great to see someone pushing the envelope of this kind of instrument.
https://teenage.engineering/products/op-xy