Comment by brudgers
1 day ago
[context: I have eBay’d a couple of Pocket Operators because I was curious and the price was low enough I knew I could at least break even reselling on Reverb even after fees and shipping…This is how I rationalize my gas.]
Maybe buy one and if it is not for you be ok reselling it at a loss…framing it as renting an instrument helps me.
The Pocket Operators are musical and inexpensive for musical instruments.
Like any musical instrument practice hours are how you get amazing results and whether the instrument gels with you is the biggest influence of whether you put in the hours.
For me, the Pocket Operators haven’t gelled…I just don’t enjoy them enough to put in the time. But other people find them great and I can see why (not-for-me != bad).
The pocket operators have kind of 'grown up' and now they are doing a larger format thingie that is kinda like a pocket operator: https://teenage.engineering/products/ep
I especially like the bardcore one: https://teenage.engineering/products/ep-1320
The newest one, EP-40, just came out! It's got the best specs by far and the features are a superset of the original EP-133, so it would be my strong recommendation. Unfortunately EP-1320 never received any updates so it lags behind, but hopefully they remedy that. Just don't buy hardware with hopes of unpromised future updates!
Edit: Because they don't make it totally clear- whichever one you buy, you can clear all the stock sounds and make any genre of music, regardless of the theming.
They're great, but I feel their pricing moves them out of impulse purchase (or "drunk eBay") territory. And for me, they're kinda in that no mans land of "I want something better that my OPs, do I spend a few hundred bucks on one of those, a few grand on an OP-1, or do I start looking at Behringer clones or 2nd hand pro music studio gear?"
Yes there are now pocket operators that don’t fit in a pocket…for clarity, that’s not what I was talking about but the practice thing still applies.