teenage engineering Pocket Operator PO-14 Sub Bass Synthesizer and Sequencer

I picked this up thinking it would be a fun toy to fiddle around with on the couch. These things are shockingly serious music gear & sound incredible. They are obviously feature limited but for the price, they can't be beat in terms of quality & ease of use. Once you learn the basics of one unit, the features mostly carry to the other units. The bass tones are nice & punchy with just enough grit to feel powerful. Punching in FX turns a blippy bass into early 90s style acid goodness. The micro drum machine built into sound 16 is just enough to give you a backbeat to sequence your bassline along to if you don't have any other rhythm & the stupid easy pattern chaining makes it quite fast to program longer phrases. I'm enjoying the Pocket Operators so much that picking the full size OP-1 is definitely looking like a possibility...

This is the most limited of all Pocket Operators, but that doesn't make it bad. Lots of fun to play with, plenty of fun to jam on, but not great for your only unit. You need to combine this with another PO, such as the PO-28 Robot which would be the lead guitar to this bass. This review will be for people already familiar with POs since it is meant to work in combination with the rest. If you're totally new to the Pocket Operator line I'd say start with either the PO-22 Arcade for 8-bit chiptunes, or the PO-12 or P0-32 which are more complete drum sequencers that work well on their own. On to the Bass... Pros: Thumping basslines. Other Pocket Operators have bass, but this one is specifically tuned to make really awesome bass grooves. I put on some good-quality headphones and in a few minutes with this and a PO-28 Robot hooked up I was making such rocking tunes that I was dancing in my seat. Fun fun fun. This thing will get a room full of people on the dance floor. MSRP is $10 less than POs, so the price is in line with the reduced function as a bass-only-unit. Like all other POs, can chain sequences and sync to other POs allowing for all sorts of play options. Also has a mini drum sequencer in place of sound 16, so you can make full-fledged tunes (or at least drums and bass) on this one unit. Cons: Monophonic. Other POs tend to have up to 4 voices, split between their drum machine and other functions. The sub only has one voice for its throbbing bassline, meaning that trying to do things like punch in extra bass on the fly will just cut out the current voice. This limits the live play options a little, you can't really harmonize this unit at all in live play. However, like all POs it contains plenty of options for effects and bending your notes so you can play with it- just in a specific and limited way compared to other units. Overall: This may be the second unit you need to have alongside any other PO. As I said, I hooked this up with the PO-28 Robot and used the Robot as a lead synth. The combination had my head bobbing and my feet tapping. I'd set the Bass to a good bassline pattern (maybe 3x rhythm patterns and 1x break) than jam out lead on the Robot. When I finish a phrase with the robot I could switch to punch in some live effects on the Bass. Back and forth a few times, and I had a killer live set going. For this price and easy of play, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything on the market that can compete. The closest is the Korg Volca line, where one Volca can cost as much as two Pocket Operators. The Bass is the perfect unit to explain the PO line. Sure, it's limited. There are lots of things you can't do with it. Then again, the unit allows so much expression for so little investment. Pair the Bass with another cheap PO, (and look up some YouTube videos because the included manual is worthless), and you'll be making some record-worthy tunes in minutes. Professional musicians may quickly be annoyed with the limitations of a unit like the Bass, but for me, this is just SO. MUCH. FUN. Would you rather invest a lot more money and time into a unit like the Volca or beyond, or do you just want a portable Pocket Calculator you can take on the train and jam out on your tray table? That's why I love a Pocket Operator like the Bass. I can whip it out on the bus on my way to a destination, spend 5 minutes messing around with patterns, and by the time I get home I'm running to grab an audio recorder to capture my creations. Love the POs. Get one today.

I was frantically looking for a decent yet inexpensive gift for my aspiring DJs 16th birthday. After google searching I found this! He loves it! Im just a mom and thought this was a new sort of gadget but he immediately knew what it was because of Andrew Huang and was very excited so that was a pleasant surpeise to me. He is already using it for bass lines and when we go on road trips he is happy to use it. He wishes it had more drum selection like snare and high hat and beyter drum selection but for the price I paid there really are no complaints. He now wants all of them of course :) I'm very happy I found this..apparently you cant go wrong with with a Pocket Operator

The entire pocket operator line is wonderful. 15 unique bass sounds and a micro-drum machine all wrapped into this little portable synth. Of course with a 3.5mm line running to a good speaker or monitor you truly get to hear how fabulous this bass synth sounds. I run it through a basic portable Bose SoundLink speaker and it's phenomenal. The sequencer is easy to programme and once you get the feel of creating, erasing, and modifying sequences the operation is the same on all the PO units. Highly recommend them. Don't think of them as toys, you can make some serious music on these. Please approach them with the mindset of a programmer and sequencer, you won't be playing Mozart on these but you can make some crazy, fun rhythms and songs. Easily syncs with other PO systems.

My girlfriend got me the Mega Man one for my birthday and I’m kind of hooked. When I found out the Street Fighter one was a sampler, I got it. Then though I’ve pulled great bass out of both having a dedicated bass line for the pocket band seemed proper. That’s the rabbit hole you should be careful of, once you’ve purchased a few of these you could have gotten something nice without so much limitation. For the value of one though, you’ll be hard pressed to find something that makes sounds like this at this cost. Maybe batteries and finger pinching buttons aren’t great for stage performance but make no judgment of this books cover, they are studio companions. Some of the acid bass I’ve pulled out is comparable to my 303. Not to mention some real funky deep sub lines (sometimes it’s hard to get rid of static, but not impossible and as a lo-fi cat, sometimes I like it). The drum machine might be the cheesiest of all pocket operators but it is there so you can make a jam with only it, but I highly recommend this one as a backup instrument to other pocket operators or a Korg Volca. A tiny interface that gets ahead of you sometimes, lots of functions require pressing two or three buttons at once so that can be a pain. All in all if you love electronic music and the fact that circuits make sound that can be morphed into notes, these are dope!

fantastic gifts for our kids (10 and 12), unfortunately their dad keeps playing with it :)

And now I am not musically gifted to any extent, but I am attempting to further my musical abilities. The thing is kind of difficult to use, but I feel like once you get it down all of them function the same way pretty much. So it will be a breeze to learn a new, if you plan to have more than one. But the functions, sounds, and well just everything about this device makes it a bargain for what you get in this thing. (Or any pocket operator in my opinion.)

This little synth packs do much punch and value into a travel sized handheld. I've always wanted to experiment with electronic instruments but price can a daunting factor when you have no clue what you're doing, I've had my eyes on these for years and finally pulled the trigger. The device itself takes some time to get familiar with but once you do it's easy to use. There are so many features layered in how each button works or changes as you press them. It's helped me understand so much more about sounds being able to play with noise on the go.

I found out about the Pocket Operators a couple of months ago and have since become a huge fan of these amazing instruments. They're fun, but serious enough to be used live and in the studio and not as flimsy as you'd think. The variations of sounds you can get from each of the 15 bass sounds (And 1 micro drum kit) is huge by combining the A and B parameter controls with the 16 play styles (How the note is played) and 16 effects. (Sounds 12 - 15 seem like they should come from a much larger, expensive device!) A seemingly major down point is that they're chromatically locked to C major, so if you want any sharps/flats you need to use the semi-tone bend effect on fx number 15. I thought this was going to be a problem, but I haven't had any issues with it at all, in fact, it enables me to think up more creative basslines. Another thing to point out is that I thought my device was broken straight out of the box as it would not turn on when the batteries were inserted. However, I discovered on a forum that by bending the battery connection points in a little, the problem was solved. I don't think I'll bother getting a case as it looks cool and is pretty sturdy - as long as you don't sling it loose into a bag or leave it lying around on the floor somewhere... Recording lines live can be a little tricky, but once you'e used to it, building up and chaining pattern sequences is quite intuitive and powerful, especially when synced to other Pocket Operators and similar devices. A lot of people have described these as 'Toys', which is a slightly misleading thing if you haven't 'Played' with them; it's small and fun, but so is a Harmonica or a Ukulele, and this can do SO much more. Oh... and there's a little dude running around on the screen while you play things that goes back to bed to sleep when playing is done!

Delivered. Works.

Right on

La courbe d’apprentissage est un peut ferme, mais une fois les contrôles compris on peut s’amuser pendant des heures. Très bon cadeau pour passionné

Muy bueno y a un precio inmejorable