I live in Brazil and the import duties/taxes (and our devalueted money) are making buy gear fucking prohibitive. However, the destiny is smilling to me and I´ll travel two times to Europe in the next months, so I´m carefully thinking about which gear I´ll buy.
I liked the OG Pocket Operators but (i) think that they are very fragile and the cases expensive; (ii) didn´t used them very much, although is nice to have them around to spice up the things (been using them in the beat forum battles, for example), (iii) my PO-12 arrived broken/glitched (but it works) but it was so annoying to send it back to Colette/TE that I choose to stay with the drum machine, which made me think about the quality control of the PO´s in general, (iv) buying the three will cost me near 200 euros, which is the price of other stuff that I´m planning to buy and maybe I´ll use more than the PO´s in the long term.
So, If I have to choose one of the new PO´s, which one do you recommend? I liked the concept of all the three.
Seems the consensus is the Arcade is the best due to the fact you can play all 16 sounds at once so you can program complex songs. It has a very distinctly chip tune sound though so take that for what it is. Office is really cool, but is basically an PO12 with weird office samples, so sounds like you have that covered. I like the Robot-edit- best. It has the most neutral normal sounding engine, although it’s still lo-Fi 8 bit sounding, but less “video game specific” sounding. Hope that helps you decide.
@aeoner That whole tax/duty situation sucks, happy to hear travel will help you to get round that! I have Office and Arcade and haven’t had any problems with either.
I guess it depends on what sort of music you want to make. If its more beats you want Office is great and certainly different enough from PO-12 to make it worth while otherwise I’d be looking at either Robot and Arcade.
Arcade has the chords function which is great for quick song building. Its very chiptune, if you like those old computer game sounds then you’ll love this.
Robot sounds great but I’ve not tried one. It seems to have a good rhythm section to it and seems like an excellent synth for soloing over the top of other instruments - it might be a really good match for your PO-12 if you like the idea of soloing over your beats instead of chiptune chords/songbuilding.
I’m sure others will have a different take on the new POs. Again, its all about what you want to do that’ll help you to work out which would suit your music the better.
I think Office is the weakest of the bunch in that it is the hardest to get it out of sounding like itself all the time, the samples are very distinctive and not much can be done to them in comparison to all the others, although for noise/industrial sounds it is pretty cool. The arcade whilst very chiptune sounding is certainly no one trick pony, although it does almost invite you to fall into cliches, but if you use restraint it can sound very nice. The robot is a bit chiptune sounding too, but more sid than nintendo so a bit more ‘real synth’ the drum machine on it has some great sounds, and it can do some serious basslines, the solo synth is kind of romantic/nostalgic/naive/funny/sad/optimistic and more
If I had to choose one it would be Robot closely followed by Arcade.
