PO-33 and PO-35 has the same drums as PO-32, so why buy the PO-32?

Hi everybody. I just got myself the metal pocket operators. So sorry for being a noob. But as the drumengine of the PO-32 tonic is in both the PO-33 KO! And in the PO-35 Speak, why would I need the PO-32? Yeah it has better/more/different effects for drums, but what are the limitations of these drumkits vs the PO-32 tonic. Both also work with microtonic…

PO-33 doesn’t have any drum engine. It’s strictly a sampler. The PO-35 has only 1 channel of the tonic engine, so you can only play 1 drum sound at a time. I think the PO-32 can play up to 4 sounds at once.

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Sammyjams is correct, but just to add - some of the stock sounds on the po-35 were clearly designed around the monophonic limitation, so for example as well as having a kick and a snare sound, there’s a sound that is both a kick and a snare in the same hit.

Worth noting that a lot of the fun of pocket operators is the punch in effects and the po-32 has 16, whereas the po-35 has 8 effects that just change the style of the speech synthesis, and only 7 drum effects. The 32 is a much more capable drum machine, but the 35 would do in a pinch.

Hi @vanark !
I also used all of them a lot throughout this year…and made an EP on them :wink: and can confirm that the Tonic’s punch-in effects make all the difference. They can harshly alter the sound of a pattern, which makes for a great build up of intensity in a song and a lot of them are useful for “sliding” from one part pf a song into the other (for example the filter sweeps). Also of course the 4 note polyphony is great.

On the Speak, the effects really are not that great in my opinion, but it has other advantages like functioning as a sweet monosynth for leads and such.

I would say that the KO is the foundation…after that the Tonic and Speak are both very powerful, but it depends on what you need. A good drummachine with nice effects, or a weird speechsynth that can be a monosynth and has limited drummachine capabilities.

Hope this helps somehow.

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Thanks for your great input. So the PO-35’s tonic engine is monophonic, if I understand you correct? I got the OP-1 coming tomorrow, so I was considering selling some of my PO’s, but for what I understand after asking a couple of questions in this forum, I should def. keep all of them :slight_smile: Thanks guys!

Yeah, the 35 has a monophonic synth engine and a monophonic drum engine.

I think that you should also consider getting the PO-12, as you told in the other post that you spent all your money getting the OP-1.

I love the Tonic (even got two!) but I also think that the PO-12 sounds amazing - and it have better polyphony for really complex drum programming. My only complain is that the punch-in FX in the 12 are harder to deactivate in live situations than in the Tonic, but are great nevertheless.

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@RisingSon said:
Yeah, the 35 has a monophonic synth engine and a monophonic drum engine.

I understand the PO-35 and the PO-14 are the ones that have, strictly speaking, only two voices. Ain’t it?

Weird, they are the only two I bought.

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get PO-33 + mobile phone with FM radio and Internet access + maybe portable recorder to have original samples in good quality and abilities to add gain, reverb, eq, cut the slice accurately saving lot of space.

i love your op1f sounds from the te website (i’ve assumed you are the same aeoner)

can you explain more your comments on the po-12 sounding better than po-32 for polyphony? i always thought the 32 was the 12 but better.

thanks!

Hi, thank you very much! I’m glad that you liked the op1f sounds. I hope them inspire you.

Sure.

The PO-12 have a polyphony of 6 simultaneous drum parts; the PO-32 have a polyphony of 4 drums parts and 4 choke groups (think about each one of the 4 columns being a different track; two sounds from the same column choke/mute each other).

Although I love the PO-32 (probably my favorite one after the K.O.), I don’t think it is better than the PO-12; the Rhythm is super straightforward, all the drum parts sounds good/massive and it is super easy to use.

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very inspiring for me. i’ve made lots of stuff on the op1f with the koenji sound especially!

ah ok that makes a ton of sense thanks for this info! so i currently have po33 and 32 but am now intrigued by 12. i actually do have a po12 soundpack for my ep133 so perhaps for now i will wait on po12, but i am so very tempted by it!