Thanks for making this, been curious about this specifically before I get one but haven't seen anyone else talk about it in detail yet (and I never owned an OP-Z). There's a 'making a song in 50 seconds' video on the TE YT channel that got me really excited, but couldn't tell if it was a silly gimmick you end up never using or something actually useful. Seems like the latter for me at least. And good to know you can still manually override the processing and do extensions, so you're not stuck with just the 7 diatonic chords from your original key. Looks powerful.
That works great, on OP-XY and OP-Z, although it’s not a question of exporting a midi file. I just plug the OP-XY or -Z into my computer with a USB-C cable, and record the midi into Ableton Live, with Live set as the clock master, and OP-xx set to follow external clock and transport (play, stop, etc). Just hit record. You could use any kind of midi recorder. The individual tracks on OP-xx , set them to different midi channels.
love it! keepem comin. next sequencing some external gear? or routing it back into xy like an external instrument in ableton. as detailed as possible please ❤
Can you select which tracks get effected by brain? In ambient for instance Id like to keep the drone and pads untouched, but only play with the arp. All three tracks however would be considered "melodic" by xy, I fear. Anyway of excluding certain tracks?
How can you see the length of step after the fact? opz had some smart color coding for displaying micro timing (nudging) and step length. unfortunately TE seems really strict with their design philosophy on that front and does not seem to utilize colored LEDs, besides this one exception of red for recording and aux tracks.
Sure! This is a straight forward groovebox with a great depth if you want to go digging for fun features and techniques. It’s expensive tho if you’re just looking for making beats to jam to. But if you got the cash - go for it!
On the OP-Z, when holding down single notes that's in the current scale it always follows the main scale, that doesn't seem to be the case here? Or maybe I'm just confused by you hitting random notes 😁 On the OP-Z the keys also lit up to help you see which notes belong to the scale, but the XY doesn't seem to do that? Just showing you on the screen, it was quite handy to see directly on the keys.
Is there a reason Im not seeing why you keep the track scale at 1 for changing the "chord" every 2 bars? I personally avoid having multiple pages as much as possible. Without a proper indication on screen, Im sure I will get lost. Even with the LEDs on DIGITAKT II, I got lost... If you want to hit the 1 of any bar, you could even make a track scale of 16 and would have 16 bars on one "page", right?
This was just an example to that you can program the change into the sequencer. You can ofcourse change the track scale and keep it all on one page but that will be hard if you want the chord change to happen somewhere else other then the 1
You kinda lost me at 6:05; I did not understand the "linking" - its not really clear to me what exaclty happens when you play the keyboard on the brain track while a sequence is also "playing the keyboard" - I would assume what you play live will just add to the transposition of the sequence? Example: If you sequence it two steps higher, but then play two steps lower (4 steps in total) they negate each other, and you hear the original melodic content as if brain would be muted. Is that correct? Maybe it would be easier to understand if the screen would be more readable. Might be overkill, but what about a second camera actually zooming in on the screen; this cam could also expose the picture to show the display properly.
Yeah link is a bit confusing for me too 🤣 it allows you to select one of the tracks with the link control. Now you can play that track on the Brain page and Brain will do its transposing stuff at the same time as you play. I guess this would work better with a pad sound that holds chords for example
The second camera is something i have been thinking about adding. A while back i did these very complex videos with a lot of editing , multicam and b-roll. the result was great but the amount of editing took so long and made me burn out. This is a restart for me and this formula of video that i do now is allowing me to produce videos more quickly. So i’m trying to just make sure you get videos uploaded with an acceptable quality rather than no videos at all. But i hear ya and i too want this to be a thing in the future. Will see if i can find a simple way to do it without a lot larger workload
@@Shimmery.mp3 just an idea: how about slamming an iphone on the hot shoe of the main cam? the phones telephoto in 4k should produce enough clarity, i guess. the biggest issue is the compromise in exposure right now. when the phone exposes specifically for the xy screen, it might suffice
Hmmm, now I'm realizing the OP-XY is very Zyklus like with the Brain feature, mainly because it responds to chords and not just notes. Not completely sold on it, but it's a very cool feature!
You tell us that it goes to C minor while the screen tells you loud and clear it is playing C Phrygian. Which means, it just inverts stuff so that the lowest note is C instead of F but it plays the notes of F minor which will produce C Phrygian, which has the same notes in it as F minor. Only at the end when you trigger the link stuff you are actually getting different scales. And you can hear that it does not automatically sound good. I don’t know exactly what it is doing, maybe it is adding the extra tone you press to the scales. I think the smarter way of constructing a song in 2 keys is checking by hand how you can get your melodies step by step to align with the new key, and not go there in 1 step like “brain” wants to do.
Yeah but i play a c minor chord. Then it transposes everything to fit over a c minor. That C phrygian is just an invertion of f minor means that it kept it within the scale. And since F minor contain a C minor this doesnt make any of us wrong - in my opinion. The result is the same. And you can break out of the scale if you want to. It will not always be perfect but i think this function can help a lot of people
@@Shimmery.mp3sorry, my formulation was a bit overly harsh. There is only one note different between F minor / C phrygian and C minor: the C# would be a D in C minor. So if the original F minor chord happened to not hit the C#, the result will be C minor as well as C phrygian..The fact that you play a C and Eb will not guarantee C minor outcome, but it will sound familiar to C minor. I wonder how many keys the brain screen allows you to press simultaneously. In your case if you press C, D, Eb it seems to me brain wil have no option but to go C minor.
@@Shimmery.mp3Also, I think brain is pretty cool indeed. My first groovebox was an OP-Z and its animation on the master track set me onto a path learning music theory. However I stuck too long with grooveboxes that fixed scales for me, by providing 7 keys instead of 12. (I went from OP-Z to Deluge). I really can recommend trying to write out the transpositions manually and playing around with switching between modal variants of 1 key, for example C. Because this will give you the ability to add mood switches inside your music. The OP-Z used to be pretty good, and I am tempted to buy OP-XY because it is a groovebox that really allows use of all 12 keys of the keyboard whereas many other grooveboxes will reward using 7 keys only.
Hmmm but it’s not really a chord progression. It seems more like a transposition and why does it randomly pick different scale modes. Cool tool though.
Yeah well if you dont want a transposition of your pre-recorded melody to fit the chords you play in Brain…then i guess you just lay down some chords on a track and you got yourself a progression? The Brian is all about transposing tho.
No i think you have as much control as you want. The more theory you know the more you can control it and if you want total control just play the chords and melodies as you want them to be 👍
Thanks for making this, been curious about this specifically before I get one but haven't seen anyone else talk about it in detail yet (and I never owned an OP-Z). There's a 'making a song in 50 seconds' video on the TE YT channel that got me really excited, but couldn't tell if it was a silly gimmick you end up never using or something actually useful. Seems like the latter for me at least. And good to know you can still manually override the processing and do extensions, so you're not stuck with just the 7 diatonic chords from your original key. Looks powerful.
I love that feature. Great for writing a bridge or B section.
Totally! 😃
Wasn’t a feature I was personally interested in but seeing it in action has really intrigued me
That’s awesome to hear 😃👍
Have you attempted to export tracks/ sequences as MIDI for use in a DAW? That's something l've been wondering about.
Same! Im hoping there’s an easy way to get the tracks out haha
That works great, on OP-XY and OP-Z, although it’s not a question of exporting a midi file. I just plug the OP-XY or -Z into my computer with a USB-C cable, and record the midi into Ableton Live, with Live set as the clock master, and OP-xx set to follow external clock and transport (play, stop, etc). Just hit record. You could use any kind of midi recorder. The individual tracks on OP-xx , set them to different midi channels.
This and the tape were always my favorite stuff.. really underutilized by most and something I greatly miss..
The tape on XY actually seem to have been nerfed compared to Z. Hopefully it’ll get some love in a future firmware update
love it! keepem comin. next sequencing some external gear? or routing it back into xy like an external instrument in ableton. as detailed as possible please ❤
Thank you so much 🙏 External gear connectivity is on the list. Just needs more planning than the other vids.
Speaking of happy accidents. I got a lot of nice chords on the Z which I wouldn’t have thought of since I don’t know a lot of theory.
Yeah that is so good with this kind of function. Love to hear that 🍻
[holding space for Synth Samurai “witty” TE hate comment]
🤣🤣🤣
thx for zoomin in. much better! could be even more for my taste
❤️❤️❤️
"Food show"! Exactly! 😂
🤣🤣🤣
This is awesome! Sold me! 🎉❤
Glad you like it bud 🙏😃
Can you select which tracks get effected by brain? In ambient for instance Id like to keep the drone and pads untouched, but only play with the arp. All three tracks however would be considered "melodic" by xy, I fear. Anyway of excluding certain tracks?
Damn i forgot to mention that!!! 🙈😢 if you press M2 you can select what tracks get affected by Brain and not
@@Shimmery.mp3 dangit. wouldve loved to see that. but it cleverly never tries to apply itself to a drm sampler for instance? or could you force it to?
Damn brother, chill out 😂
@@phatplates gas gas gas 8)
@@reneeschke lol I know 😉
tomorrow can not come soon enough.
Lucky you 🥰
4:25 the record indicator on the screen is displayed right on top of the scale name. that’s a bit inconvenient
I agree…That is not great
How can you see the length of step after the fact? opz had some smart color coding for displaying micro timing (nudging) and step length. unfortunately TE seems really strict with their design philosophy on that front and does not seem to utilize colored LEDs, besides this one exception of red for recording and aux tracks.
You hold a step and the length is displayed in a dimmed out light. It’s easy to see in person. Might not be easy on cam
@ and nudging? opz could not tell you by how much, but it didshow which side its nudged to. hows it on the xy?
well explained (:)) - thanks
Glad i could help :)
"Lots of trolls commenting on a TE video. That's a surprise!" Said nobody, ever. Anyhoo ... does Brain listen to external MIDI keyboard as well?
Do you think the learning curve is ok for a "normal" musician who wants to use it to create some nice backbeats?
Sure! This is a straight forward groovebox with a great depth if you want to go digging for fun features and techniques. It’s expensive tho if you’re just looking for making beats to jam to. But if you got the cash - go for it!
@ thanks. Sounds like something I need to explore. Curiosity.
@@Shimmery.mp3 thanks for the reply. still teasing.
On the OP-Z, when holding down single notes that's in the current scale it always follows the main scale, that doesn't seem to be the case here? Or maybe I'm just confused by you hitting random notes 😁 On the OP-Z the keys also lit up to help you see which notes belong to the scale, but the XY doesn't seem to do that? Just showing you on the screen, it was quite handy to see directly on the keys.
Roland's jd-xi has this brain-style transposition 😉
Is there a reason Im not seeing why you keep the track scale at 1 for changing the "chord" every 2 bars? I personally avoid having multiple pages as much as possible. Without a proper indication on screen, Im sure I will get lost. Even with the LEDs on DIGITAKT II, I got lost... If you want to hit the 1 of any bar, you could even make a track scale of 16 and would have 16 bars on one "page", right?
This was just an example to that you can program the change into the sequencer. You can ofcourse change the track scale and keep it all on one page but that will be hard if you want the chord change to happen somewhere else other then the 1
@ but it still could be recorded in live accurate to at least the sixteenth note, right? just like opz?
garageband on my 2012 ipad had these same "new wonderful" features 🤷🏽♂️
You kinda lost me at 6:05; I did not understand the "linking" - its not really clear to me what exaclty happens when you play the keyboard on the brain track while a sequence is also "playing the keyboard" - I would assume what you play live will just add to the transposition of the sequence? Example: If you sequence it two steps higher, but then play two steps lower (4 steps in total) they negate each other, and you hear the original melodic content as if brain would be muted. Is that correct? Maybe it would be easier to understand if the screen would be more readable. Might be overkill, but what about a second camera actually zooming in on the screen; this cam could also expose the picture to show the display properly.
Yeah link is a bit confusing for me too 🤣 it allows you to select one of the tracks with the link control. Now you can play that track on the Brain page and Brain will do its transposing stuff at the same time as you play. I guess this would work better with a pad sound that holds chords for example
The second camera is something i have been thinking about adding. A while back i did these very complex videos with a lot of editing , multicam and b-roll. the result was great but the amount of editing took so long and made me burn out. This is a restart for me and this formula of video that i do now is allowing me to produce videos more quickly. So i’m trying to just make sure you get videos uploaded with an acceptable quality rather than no videos at all. But i hear ya and i too want this to be a thing in the future. Will see if i can find a simple way to do it without a lot larger workload
@@Shimmery.mp3 if thats the case dont mind my whining! i rather see frequent vids than rare overproduced ones.
@@Shimmery.mp3 just an idea: how about slamming an iphone on the hot shoe of the main cam? the phones telephoto in 4k should produce enough clarity, i guess. the biggest issue is the compromise in exposure right now. when the phone exposes specifically for the xy screen, it might suffice
Hmmm, now I'm realizing the OP-XY is very Zyklus like with the Brain feature, mainly because it responds to chords and not just notes. Not completely sold on it, but it's a very cool feature!
Bloody HDR…
Sorry 😅
You tell us that it goes to C minor while the screen tells you loud and clear it is playing C Phrygian. Which means, it just inverts stuff so that the lowest note is C instead of F but it plays the notes of F minor which will produce C Phrygian, which has the same notes in it as F minor. Only at the end when you trigger the link stuff you are actually getting different scales. And you can hear that it does not automatically sound good. I don’t know exactly what it is doing, maybe it is adding the extra tone you press to the scales. I think the smarter way of constructing a song in 2 keys is checking by hand how you can get your melodies step by step to align with the new key, and not go there in 1 step like “brain” wants to do.
Yeah but i play a c minor chord. Then it transposes everything to fit over a c minor. That C phrygian is just an invertion of f minor means that it kept it within the scale. And since F minor contain a C minor this doesnt make any of us wrong - in my opinion. The result is the same. And you can break out of the scale if you want to. It will not always be perfect but i think this function can help a lot of people
@@Shimmery.mp3sorry, my formulation was a bit overly harsh. There is only one note different between F minor / C phrygian and C minor: the C# would be a D in C minor. So if the original F minor chord happened to not hit the C#, the result will be C minor as well as C phrygian..The fact that you play a C and Eb will not guarantee C minor outcome, but it will sound familiar to C minor. I wonder how many keys the brain screen allows you to press simultaneously. In your case if you press C, D, Eb it seems to me brain wil have no option but to go C minor.
@@Shimmery.mp3Also, I think brain is pretty cool indeed. My first groovebox was an OP-Z and its animation on the master track set me onto a path learning music theory. However I stuck too long with grooveboxes that fixed scales for me, by providing 7 keys instead of 12. (I went from OP-Z to Deluge). I really can recommend trying to write out the transpositions manually and playing around with switching between modal variants of 1 key, for example C. Because this will give you the ability to add mood switches inside your music. The OP-Z used to be pretty good, and I am tempted to buy OP-XY because it is a groovebox that really allows use of all 12 keys of the keyboard whereas many other grooveboxes will reward using 7 keys only.
Hmmm but it’s not really a chord progression. It seems more like a transposition and why does it randomly pick different scale modes. Cool tool though.
Yeah well if you dont want a transposition of your pre-recorded melody to fit the chords you play in Brain…then i guess you just lay down some chords on a track and you got yourself a progression? The Brian is all about transposing tho.
So basically you have no control over the final result🥲
No i think you have as much control as you want. The more theory you know the more you can control it and if you want total control just play the chords and melodies as you want them to be 👍
First ugly-looking design from TE.
Nah i love it! In person it looks awesome 😎