I would love more keymode controls for the drum sampling on the OP-1. It would be nice in some situations to have simple control over mono and poly modes, mono when you wanted new sounds to mute the playing ones. The ability to at the press of a button enable and disable the ADSR (much like such button presses control effects and the LFO). A proper attack parameter for when not dealing with percussion samples although within the more flexible drum sampler. A glissando parameter would be very unique as well. Press a note and each sound assigned to the keys between it and the last note pressed are, perhaps faintly, heard with control over rate similar to legato.
I have not used the OP-1's tape export feature much thus far, instead electing to record a few minutes of whatever I had been working on to the album mode and starting anew. I had been hung up on the same song for far too long, but was unwilling to abandon it due to its great potential. This evening I decided I would back up the tape tracks to my computer and at least have them if I remember the song in the future. My production methods center around hardware sequencers driving hardware synthesizers, and I am usually too lazy to enter program changes as sequencer data. When I walk away from a track, despite being saved, it usually ends up being forever. It's simply not an inspiring experience to change the master volume of every machine in the room and go digging through your various patches on various synths when you're in a mood to create.
When I copied the tape tracks from the OP-1 to a folder on my computer, I noticed another set of tracks labeled by date and realized that it was one of the first songs I had worked on using the OP-1. It was then that I considered the rich possibility of accessing previously recorded material from within the original environment in which it was created. I didn't do it, eager as I was to get down new ideas, but adding another dated folder of tracks pleased me in knowing that I was building a library of past ideas.
As an afterthought, I feel it would be nice to have a command to save everything at once, as I often do not store my created sounds. I would support this idea even if it meant having to save each synth and drum part as a snapshot, because loading an ALL file would be easier than looking for your user sounds, and if it assigned them to the last slot they were in, you wouldn't have to bother naming the good ones at all.
The tape function is such a wonderful thing to use, and I wish more products had features that resembled it. To know that something has been captured as audio the way you originally heard it makes it so easy to move on. You can copy and paste the section, then tweak the sound you recorded and continue to build your song knowing the last part will remain as you remembered it. I do this without saving the previous state of the sound, which could be problematic if I wanted to bring that sound back later in the song, but it is refreshing to have to either use a new sound altogether or become more familiar with the obscure programming while trying to get back to the original sound.
This might not be so revelatory to users of computer workstations, but it opens a whole new range of possibilities to a hardware advocate.
