Teenage Engineering OP-XY

The OP‑XY is a portable sequencing powerhouse.

I doubt I’m the only one who followed an arc from mad desire for Teenage Engineering’s OP‑1, to getting one, to discovering that what I really needed wasn’t a portable synth with a four‑track audio recorder but a portable synth with a multitrack sequencer. We got this with bells on with the OP‑Z, but I wished it had the same form factor as the OP‑1 with its own screen. The new OP‑XY delivers something close to this, evolving OP‑Z DNA into a workstation‑level groovebox/arranger, and leaving behind the motion graphics and lighting elements.

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: the OP‑XY is expensive. Not that this is weird: people pay a lot for really nice instruments and outboard gear, but it inevitably informs how you evaluate this device. I was particularly interested to know if the OP‑XY has the power to replace a dedicated sequencer in a desktop rig. You might want to know if it can get close to, say, an Akai MPC level of DAWless production. Either way, most of us are probably looking at the XY lustfully, so let’s see if I can help justify an investment... or talk ourselves down.

Shades Of Grey

The OP‑XY is an eight‑part, multi‑engine synth and sampler, with 16 tracks of sequencing, split into two blocks of eight. The first eight are tied to synth or MIDI parts. The second eight (the ‘Aux’ tracks) access other features, like a CV/gate track, effects returns, performance effects and The Brain: an intelligent transposer.

Looks aside, this is a different approach to the OP‑1, which has multiple instrument slots but can only play one at a time. And although the OP‑1 has sequence players, the only way to capture anything is to record live into the four‑track digital ‘tape’ machine. The XY, like the Z, is multitimbral, with 24 voices dynamically allocated across eight parallel engines, powered by a dual‑core CPU and DSP coprocessor.

The XY has the same gorgeous housing as the OP‑1 and is roughly the size of a compact computer keyboard. The difference on the panel is that the natural keys have been shrunk to the same size as the accidentals to make room for a new row of step triggers. Visually the OP‑XY is differentiated with a greyscale design and an ombré gradient across the trig keys. This is mirrored by the high‑res screen, which, though capable of full colour, stays resolutely monochrome apart from some sparing use of red. Red means recording.

Connectivity comprises dedicated audio in/out and MIDI input on TRS mini‑jacks. Bluetooth MIDI and clock are available, but not Wi‑Fi. USB‑C provides charging of the internal battery, plus MIDI, audio and data interfacing. Then there’s an unusual multifunction output port that can be switched between audio, MIDI, CV and sync modes.

The keys feel like a computer keyboard but are velocity sensitive. The encoders are also buttons and have a clicky action, which is great for working with lists but makes synth tweaking inherently steppy.

The Samplers

New projects start with two drum tracks and a selection of instruments, but you can reassign the tracks freely. The drum sampler feels familiar from the OP‑1 Field, with 24 one‑shot sample slots that can be triggered or gated. Having a polyphonic kit of sounds taking up just one track offers a lot of scope for your productions.

A major improvement is that the drum sampler uses individual samples for each key instead of a single sliced file. You can load — and sample — into each key directly, and the XY has a proper sample manager on board. Like the OP‑Z, each track has a filter, and two sends to global effects.

The vertical portion of the cross to the right‑hand side is a level meter, and the barely visible protrusion at the bottom left is a pitch‑bend pad.

There are three low‑pass filter modes and a high‑pass to choose from. Apart from the whistly resonance on the ladder they all sound similar to me. Comparing them isn’t straightforward as, annoyingly, changing mode resets all parameters. The filter gets its own envelope. Usefully, there’s an additional static high‑pass filter tucked away in the instrument settings.

A significant limitation in the drum sampler is that, although each slot has its own pitch, mode and trim settings, all sounds share envelope and filter settings. This seems strange, as each voice has its own filter and VCA that follow the envelopes independently — it’s not a paraphonic situation. Hopefully this might be tweaked in the future.

The other thing that falls short compared to other premium sampling workstations is the lack of chopping/slicing functionality. To play chops from a sampled passage you need to fall back on copying the same sample to multiple keys and assigning different start points manually. There’s no option to time‑stretch for tempo‑matching chops or loops.

Two further sample engines are available. Sampler is the same as the OP‑1 sampler, providing chromatic playback of a single sample. Multisampler offers multiple key zones (but not velocity zones). The factory library showcases this with some lovely presets including strings and a piano. When building patches you can sample or load to a key and the XY will automatically create zones. When importing it will also set root pitches based on file names. Crossfaded loop points can be set, or read if there’s loop metadata.

The...