Teenage Engineering - Operator-1

This has to be one of the most interesting bits of studio kit that I've seen in a long time. A new company (seemingly from Sweden, although loads of their website text is oriental) called Teenage Engineering, were showing a new product called Operator-1 at Frankfurt Musikmesse this year.

It's going to be a super portable controller/sequencer, that you can use on the road. One of the most interesting things for me, is that it is going to include a proper (hopefully!) synthesizer, and functions for drum noise generation as well. From talking to the TE guys, they say it's going to have some type of sequencer function, but they weren't clear whether the paradigm was going to be a Cubase/Logic/Sonar type, step, Live, or multiple types.


Either way, it looks really exciting - it's a really slim, Mac-looking unit in a sleek aluminium case, with an absolutely gorgeous OLED display. They reckon it'll run for mabye 8 hours on battery power, and you can use it as a controller for your main computer when it's hooked up.

No idea on price (they made a guess when I asked them, but as I'm not sure they have their pricing and distribution model hammered out yet I'll do them the courtesy of not publishing their guesstimate) - but they plan to ship within the year.

It really does look like very cool technology, and for my money, was probably the coolest new hi-tech MI product at Messe this year.