alt Hacker NewsHow are these, are they worth the money? I have seen these before, but thought they might be crappy "jokes". However, if they are decent, I would love to play around with them.
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[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).
I have a friend that writes lots of music on the PO-33. They are fun, definitely toyish, but you can get good results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBo8Rd7HxdU <- a friend that creates a lot of music on small "affordable" pieces of gear.
They're definitely very capable but limited machines, I enjoyed mine a lot until the potentiometers started thinking there was a change in the degrees even when I wasn't moving them
They -are- decent modular chunks. They have a bit of opinion pushing you in certain directions as far as sound goes.
Each one does a pretty limited set of things and combining them can be annoying.
But you get a lot for the money you spend on them.
It’s pretty capable hardware, but in my personal opinion the UI sucks. It falls into the category of “why did you make this hard on purpose” and I resent it.
"worth the money" is hard to say, especially for devices like these where the value is not really so much on the plain features as much as a more subjective factors like the design and the UI. I would say that purely based on features - probably not, especially with post-covid pricing. There are more powerful iphone or android apps for much less. Behringer, and to some degree Korg and Roland offer lower-end devices for not much more that ultimately might be more useful and usable. But, I do own a couple of these little guys and they're fun. I wouldn't call them "jokes", but calling them "toys" - in the good and bad sense - would probably not be a stretch, even if you can get some nice sounds out of them. I used to keep a couple on my desk and just jam a little with them as a distraction.