Let’s just be frank – the OP-1 wasn’t supposed to just be a ‘MIDI piano’, it was designed to be a powerful synth capable of playing, sampling, editing, looping, and even granulated synthesizing. Giving it 24 keys and the visual template of a keyboard might have made it appealing to most traditional musicians, but a true electronic music aficionado knows there’s versatility in breaking beyond that piano-style design.
Meet the OP-XY, a conceptual MIDI sequencer designed by a bunch of music/tech nerds who wanted to see it achieve its full potential. The OP-XY is the OP-1’s spiritual successor, even if it’s just a fan-made concept. It ditches the piano keys for a 16-key sequencer layout, and uses the rest of the real estate for a bunch of other buttons and features that let you compose, sample, produce, and perform music in a much more liberating way.
Designers: Evgeny Smertin, Sergey Ashifin, Kirill Ignatenko
The design, for the most part, remains the same, although the OP-XY sheds Teenage Engineering’s fun-meets-functional color palette for something more brooding. It still has the same playful buttons and knobs, but in a completely achromatic (greyscale) colorway that screams ‘serious musician’ rather than ‘creative songmaker’. The layout, however, gets a slight change, albeit still having enough of a similarity that anyone running the OP-1 will be able to begin using this bad-boy just through muscle-memory alone.
The OP-XY replaces the keys and vague knobs with more concrete tools. You’ve got editing/playback functions with their own dedicated keys, effects get their own row, dedicated editing and metronome buttons allow for granular control. The screen, the knobs, and the speaker still sit exactly where they’re meant to, so that the OP-XY still has the same appeal as its predecessor.
The buttons have quirky iconography that does come with a sort of learning curve, but then again that’s what’s so fun about the OP-XY. You navigate the keys and controls through this new visual language (which replaces the colored keys). There are different buttons for inputs, EQs, stems, sequences, etc. There’s also a button with a human brain on it, a button with a mushroom cloud/explosion on it, it’s all a part of what makes such tech quirky and fun – something that’s very on-brand for Teenage Engineering.
Sadly though, the OP-XY is just a concept created as an ode to Teenage Engineering. I wish it existed, just to be able to see what wild tunes people created with it. The OP-1’s fundamental appeal for me was entirely in seeing Swedish House Mafia play a track on it in their music video for One featuring Pharrell. The joy of seeing a concept like the OP-XY also lies in fantasizing about my favorite artists creating absolute gems on it. Or maybe I could just appreciate its wild-yet-serious design and how cool it would look in Teenage Engineering’s product catalog!
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