Here are some loops created on the PO33:
And these are 32 step loops:
PO-33 Longer Melody Attempt (“Church Bell”)
I really like this one. It samples a sound from the PO-14 and uses it as a bassline. In addition, I used this church bell sample and I think it works well. In this clip you can hear the melody playing twice. The second time I added a bit of swing.
PO-33 First Attempt At Sampling
My newest Pocket Operator is one from the latest metal series – the PO-33 K.O! The nice thing about this one is that it’s has a sampler – you can record sounds (either melodic or drums) and use them for your loops.
For this first attempt, which I admit isn’t that great, I used a very short sample from the beginning of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” for the main sound. You wouldn’t know it from listening to the sample because I totally trimmed and distorted it, which is not really how you’re supposed to sample. But I just wanted to see how it goes.
PO Loops With More Than 16 Steps
The Pocket Operators have 16 steps per pattern (which I, for some strange reason, call a loop). Now that I have a little more experience with the POs I tried creating loops that combine two patterns to get 32 steps per loop. They’re not the greatest, but they’re fine for first attempts:
Here’s a minimalistic PO-20 32-step pattern. I really wanted to expand this with more sounds, but couldn’t figure it out:
And here’s a P-14 one:
PO-14 Dump
PO-20 Dump
Sometimes, when creating a loop, the end result may sound good only during creation. On a second listen (or after) it might sound like a big mess. I realized that it may be important to include the steps it took to get to the final product just so that the ears can make sense of all the sounds playing together. Here’s an example. The last step of the loop progression is so noisy that without the steps to get there it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
And here are more PO-20 loops I recorded:
PO-20 Loop Dump
I’m dumping some loops I’ve created over time so that I can free up some memory in my PO-20.
Some of these I like more than others. A good loop, in my opinion, is one I can let play for a while and doesn’t bother me or, even better, makes me bob my head like I’m listening to a good track :)
More Loops – PO-14 and PO-20
Here’s a short “song progression” I created on the PO-20. It doesn’t use many of the traditional PO-20 arcade sounds, but I like its slowness and I think it came out pretty minimalistic and nice.
In this PO-14 sample, I play two loops that seem to complement each other, at least to my ears. I also mess around with a bit of live playing, switching the loop’s main sound.
Playing Around With The Pocket Operator 14
For my 41st birthday I got two very cool little hand-held synthesizers – the Pocket Operator PO-14 (“sub”) and PO-20 (“arcade”).
I really enjoy playing around with them and making music loops.
Here are some loops I created with the PO-14:
5 Minutes Of Fun With Chrome Music Lab
I like this new Chrome Music Lab experiment, which is part of the Chrome Music Lab.
Here’s a short beat loop thing I “created” in about 5 minutes: