You’ll have some sound quality issues if you do manage to squeeze those tracks into the OP-1 using a reduced tape speed. At the slowest tape speed I believe you can get 24 minutes out of each track, but at a much lower fidelity.
Tempo won’t matter if you lay the tracks out and just need to press play. If you want to loop stuff and keep sections at different tempos, you’ll have to do some live button pressing, but it won’t be bad. You can loop a section of tape that is currently being played by pressing shift and the loop button at the same time on the tape screen. I haven’t experimented with using the OP-1 to play backing tracks, so you might run into a maximum time constraint using this method. Not sure.
There are surely better machines for what you want to do, but if you already have the OP-1 you can probably figure something out with a few sacrifices.
Sadly I’ve been looking for other keyboards that play backing tracks and have been pretty unimpressed. Most people just use a laptop but I loathe the clutter and extra shit on stage and aesthetically hate the way laptops look…
Their is something so cool about just having a OP-1 on stage. I guess I’m a minimalist!
I’ll put my iPad Mini retina to the test next week to play the backing tracks. There’s a number of cool apps out there, I finally went for StageTraxx. If it works out all right at rehearsal I’ll take it to the next gig. But first I’ll have to see and hear if there are lag or stutter issues because I’ll need to run and play a synth as well on the iPad. So far StageTraxx worked fine with most synths (btw it’s not and will not be Audiobus compatible thanks to the iTunes import feature but it also links to Dropbox so I’m fine with this…) but I need to be sure that this is a stable setup. Like @ifthenwhy, I also want to get rid of the laptop on stage and would just love if the OP-1 had backing track function but I doubt it’ll ever happen. We’d need at least 500 MB or ideally 1GB of storage space where we could upload those backing tracks in uncompressed audio formats, all this with an additional player on the OP that doesn’t interfere with the tape player, has a separate virtual line out routing (ie.no fx or extra compression) and doesn’t compromise audio quality. The iPad sounds just brilliant straight out of the headphones output (I don’t have any interface) and we’re yet to find that in the OP. Then again, it’s not pristine digital sound we all love and use the OP for. Anyways, this is how I see and do this, thought I’d share.
I too have looked at the iPad. How you route a click to your drummer?
I'd be delighted if further iterations of the OP-1 had a Flash card slot, but I can't imagine a backing track feature is very high on the TE list..lol
StageTraxx doesn’t have the click-feature, others app do, but since the main beats and grooves are alwasy prerecorded and sequenced in our case, we don’t actually need the click. Our live drummer acts as an electro-percussionists with a Nord Drum and some pads being his primary weapon when on stage.
If we’ll ever need the click I guess I’ll take the good old Korg D3200 multitracker to the gigs. It has separate main/monitor routing so feeding the click to whoever necessary wouldn’t be a problem. Only it’s too bulky and had a few stability issues recently so I guess I’d be a little worried with that behind us…
Well…after trying for 4 days, the OP-1 pretty much does not work for playing backing tracks. It’s not designed to handle the large samples, which is no big surprise.
The Elektron Octatrack is a nightmare of UI design (I borrowed my friends for a few days, he said “It’s cool, but I don’t know how to use it very well”). I remain mystified that Electron stays in business with these kinds of interface offerings. I’m of the opinion that they should re-name this device the "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?"
For backing tracks, the simple Zoom R3 is perfect. Cheap, reliable and easy to use with a Click output.
Is there something like the Zoom R8 that can send/receive midi clock? I like the way it can loop the different samples, but it would be nice to keep it in sync with other gear.
If you bought two mini kaosspads youre able to dj with these two, It ha a mp3 wav player and you can change the tempo in real time and use it like a turntable pushing the song to the right place with the slider @ifthenwhy. For the sample play I would combine the OP-1. And of course you have effecctsss…
Anyways, this is how I see and do this, thought I’d share.