Teenage Engineering Updates OP-1 Field With Velocity Sensitivity & more

Teenage Engineering has released a free update for the OP–1 Field that adds support for velocity sensitivity and more.

Here’s what they have to say about the update:

“as of today, we’ve added velocity sensitivity to the internal OP–1 Field keyboard.

velocity has three settings – off, soft and hard. to access these settings, hold shift and press tempo. using physical touch, generally the harder you play, the louder the sound. and vice versa – the softer you play, the more gentle the sound will be. this basically means the volume of the sound will respond to how hard you play the keys. the benefit of the off setting is that you can be sure to get the maximum volume from a sound, even with soft playing. the result will always be evenly loud, which can be desired in some situations.

velocity sensitivity also works with internal sequencers, as well as over external midi, improving the experience when using OP–1 Field as the main controller for other devices, including your computer.”

Other additions in this update include:

  • The ability to adjust tape speed to external clock – if OP–1 Field is in midi sync mode and midi clock in is enabled, the tape speed will automatically match incoming external clock.
  • A mono / stereo setting for line in – use ochre to toggle while on the input screen with line in connected.
  • Pre tape panning – adjust with shift and orange while on the tape screen.
  • Syncing fm transmit frequency with OB–4 – when using the fm transmitter, your OB–4 can be automatically synced to match the optimal transmit frequency.

The update is available now via the TE site.

21 thoughts on “Teenage Engineering Updates OP-1 Field With Velocity Sensitivity & more

  1. Interesting. Certainly adds a bit more value to that price tag

    Remarkable that they didn’t decide to have this as a feature on initial release

    1. I agree. But a lot of gear now isnt about the release features, but the firmware updates. So early adopters take a gamble, but the waiters get to purchase it ready to go. I was early but its always been awesome but these things need to go through extensive QA before release and some companies take that more serious than others…. AKAI RELEASES BUGS AND SO DOES NI….cough sneeze. That was a big one.

      1. fwiw TE never promised me this or any other upgrades. The OP-1f might get some more synths or effects or whatever, but I consider it finished. I also haven’t experienced any bugs or instability in mine. OP-1 isn’t about being fully featured; it is about using abstracted tools on a tape workflow.

    2. They know exactly what they’re doing; especially, when it comes to supply chain constraints. The initial product only needs to be good enough to sell out, and then when sales dip – Boom! New firmware gets a marketing push along with replenished stock. It’s a brilliants product development life cycle.

    1. entitlement old commenters complaining so they can feel relevant is so modern and welcome.
      free firmware updates with new features is so 1978…

  2. Aha. It looks like this might be done via accelerometer readings. I was wondering, how can they add physical velocity sensors via a firmware update? But the reddit opinion is that it’s actually done via accelerometer. I wonder whether it works polyphonically.

    And then I thought, do they actually have to explain what velocity sensitivity is? “generally the harder you play, the louder the sound. and vice versa – the softer you play, the more gentle the sound will be” ? But aha, they’re just explaining what an accelerometer can do.

    1. the old one have accelerometer but don’t do that so maybe the buttons are velocity sensitive and they didn’t implement it
      elektron did it before, hiding a “plus drive” inside some machines.

  3. I would have never believed I’d say it one day, but here it comes… I can’t wait for the actually functional 500$ Behringer rip-off.

  4. I hope TE decides to build a traditional synthesizer/sampler with a ton of knobs in a larger format similar to the micro/mini freak.

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