Teenage Engineering OP-XY review: extremely fun, extremely powerful, extremely expensive

Teenage Engineering is a design firm as much as it is a musical instrument company. Its devices rarely look or behave anything like what you’d buy from a Korg or a Moog. The best distillation of its identity remains the OP-1, a quirky groovebox that garnered as much attention for its aesthetics as its all-in-one music production features. Effects are accompanied by nonsensical graphics, like a mechanized cow, and it basically forces you to commit to a musical idea by using a virtual “tape” with intentionally limited editing capabilities.

But all of Teenage Engineering’s instruments are a bit odd and often polarizing in their own way. The OP-Z is a surprisingly capable sequencer, but its screen-free design and array of icons are bewildering. The Game & Watch-inspired Pocket Operators are extremely simple but are basically disposable toys. And the $1,999 OP-1 Field is its own thing entirely, eschewing MIDI sequencing in favor of live recording.

The company’s latest portable instrument, the $2,299 OP-XY, represents something of a greatest hits tour for Teenage Engineering. It’s a sequencer, like the OP-Z, but it also has the performance-forward live effects of the Pocket Operator series. And like the OP-1 Field it resembles, it’s a synthesizer and sampler (among other things) and comes with an astronomical price tag.

The challenge for Teenage Engineering is finding the balance between these things, and the OP-XY largely succeeds. Its blend of portability and musical depth is unmatched. It’s powerful enough to be part of a finished song, yet small enough to sketch out demos in a cafe, and approachable enough to just casually jam on the couch. It feels suitably high-end, and most importantly, it’s a lot of fun. Sure, there are some odd omissions, and the price is patently insane. But for someone looking for the ultimate musical traveling companion, there’s a lot to like.

While it looks like a dark mode OP-1 synth with a bunch more buttons, the XY is a sequencer at heart, like the OP-Z, and it starts with the same workflow. This means a full-featured four-bar step sequencer rather than the intentionally limited ones you find on the OP-1, which expects you to be working with recorded audio. Where the OP-1’s vibe is playful, loose, and focused on audio loops, the OP-XY is buttoned up, on point, and very… German.

Even with 64 steps, a simple sequencer can get awfully repetitive. Plenty of companies have tried to address this with tools that let you change attributes other than the notes. The OP-XY has automation and parameter locks — you can hold a step and turn a knob to max out the reverb for one note or slowly open up the filter while live recording to build energy over the course of a pattern — but the OP-Z’s (and, by extension, the OP-XY’s) innovation is step components.

These are similar to Trig Conditions on an Elektron groovebox in that they can introduce things like probability, ratchets, or complex playback patterns. (Play this note every third time through, for example.) But the XY’s step components go well beyond simple playback variability. They can also be used to trigger random explorations of a particular scale, hold a step on one track, or even control how frequently other step components are triggered. (For example, add a pitch bend but only every other through a pattern.)

Fortunately, the OP-XY’s interface is much clearer and more intuitive than the OP-Z’s, which always felt cumbersome to me, despite Teenage Engineering’s claims that it was built for live performance. The OP-Z’s buttons are minuscule, the encoders for changing parameters are flush with the body (knobs are $19 extra), and you only have LEDs for visual feedback unless you connect to the companion app. The app does make it easier to use, but having to rely on Bluetooth and your iPhone during a live performance isn’t ideal. You don’t want to have to worry about an app crashing or a flaky wireless connection when playing for a room full of people.

The OP-XY feels downright expansive by comparison, with nearly twice as many buttons and an onboard screen. While some of the graphics are more whimsical than useful, they do make the device a lot easier to navigate.

You’ll still want to keep the manual handy while you’re finding your footing with the OP-XY. And honestly, even with the manual, certain things like Step Components aren’t entirely clear. Part of that is down to easily avoidable inconsistencies — sadly, TE doesn’t always put quite as much love and care into its manuals as its product design. For example, in the manual, the parameter, component, and trig Step Components say they will play every third, fourth, fifth step, etc., while on the device, it says it will skip every third, fourth, or fifth step. For the record, the manual is right.

Still, while this is a complicated device with a lot of features beyond the simple “place note here,” I was able to figure out most of the basics through trial and error. Unlike the OP-Z, which almost immediately frustrated me, the OP-XY is actually fun.

Each of the XY’s eight tracks has its own punch-in effects that you access by holding down the shift button and pressing one of the keys when you’re in instrument mode. So if you want just your bassline to briefly jump up an octave, to put a stuttering tremolo on your lead, or give your drums a temporary extra thump from a compressor, this is where you can do that. There’s also a dedicated punch-in effects track when you’re in auxiliary mode. That mode splits the keyboard in half; playing the lower octave only affects percussion, and the upper octave only affects melodic instruments.

These effects can get a little repetitive, but they offer a lot more possibilities than your average beat repeat and filter sweep. It makes it pretty easy to fire up a simple loop and start jamming, muting tracks, transposing notes, and adding drum stutters. This level of interactivity and room for improvisation is not something you find in every groovebox.

There’s also the Brain, which is a sort of intelligent transposer. This detects the key of a particular track or even your entire song and then allows you to shift it live by playing the keyboard or even sequencing the changes.

The Tape looper adds another opportunity for live tweaking. It’s similar to the DJFX looper found on the Roland SP-404 but with a little more flexibility. You use the encoders to dial in a desired speed and length of a loop and then trigger it by pressing the keys, which, instead of repeating steps, plays a chunk of the actual audio. While it’s best at simple beat-repeat style effects, it can be used to do some extremely sloppy pseudo-chopping of your loops.

All these performance and sequencing features wouldn’t really matter too much if the OP-XY sounded terrible. Thankfully the built-in synth engines are solid. While the range of sounds is relatively limited and sound design features even more so, they cover the basics, and most of the presets are excellent. It focuses largely on the sort of classic sounds you’d find in ’70s Krautrock like Kraftwerk or ’80s electro. Just don’t expect to sit down and meticulously create your dream bass patch. This is more of a “pick a preset and tweak it” kind of machine, like Ableton’s recent Move groovebox.

If there’s a sound you want but you can’t find among the presets or re-create with the eight onboard synth engines, there’s always the sampler. You can sample from the 1/8-inch line-in jack, over USB-C, or using the surprisingly excellent built-in microphone.

What sets the OP-XY apart from most other instruments (save modern MPCs and the 1010music Nanobox Tangerine) is that, in addition to a basic sampler, there is a multisampling engine. This allows you to place different samples across the keyboard, rather than just speeding up or slowing down a single note, for much more natural-sounding patches. You can have a maximum of 24 samples here, so you could theoretically record every note across two octaves, or stick to three or four notes per octave and still get pretty convincing-sounding re-creations. I recorded my kids’ toy piano using the onboard mic, and the results were excellent.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to do proper sample chopping on the current firmware. And somewhat surprisingly, there is no DJ-style filter that lets you lowpass or highpass your entire track for buildups and breakdowns. There is a three-band EQ that can get close, but it’s not quite as smooth.

Honestly, the encoders aren’t great for live tweaking anyway. Trying to change the speed or length of the Tape on the fly can be frustrating. Often, it would respond slower than I wanted, and then I’d compensate by turning it faster, only to overshoot my target.

Another slightly annoying limitation of the OP-XY when it comes to live performance is that the launching of patterns isn’t quantized. If you change from pattern one to pattern four on your drums, it happens immediately. That might be what you want in some situations, but it’s more likely in a live setting that you’d want to queue up the next pattern then switch to the punch-in effects to smooth the transition.

Hopefully these are things Teenage Engineering will add in future firmware updates if it’s serious about the OP-XY as a performance tool. Right now, though, the company seems focused on squashing bugs. That’s definitely a good thing since there are quite a few. The company has already issued four firmware updates and fixed some issues, including a serious one that caused a crash during boot-up.

Aside from a handful of bugs and a few odd omissions, like sample chopping and a DJ-style filter, it’s hard to complain about the OP-XY too much — except for the price. You could build a pretty well-equipped home studio for the $2,299 that Teenage Engineering is asking. If you can deal with the cramped and limited UI or don’t mind having to rely on your phone’s screen, the OP-Z will get you many of the same sequencing features for a quarter of the price. You could use the leftover money to buy a few other instruments to control with the OP-Z, like a Roland P-6, which is an affordable and excellent sampler that also happens to be a surprisingly decent granular synth and effects processor. (You’ll need the $69 oplab module or $149 line module to connect it to the OP-Z.) And you’d still have enough money to get a nice audio interface or field recorder. And if portability isn’t a factor at all, you could get both a Digitakt II and a Digitone II, plus a budget audio interface, which might be all the music gear you’d need for life.

But as great as those setups might be, they lack the all-in-one simplicity and seductive design of the OP-XY. The quality of its sounds, the power of its sequencer, and its live performance features are impressive. Even more so when you realize they’re crammed inside something that easily fits in all but the smallest of bags (and might even tuck neatly inside the largest of cargo pockets).

It can seem easy to hate on Teenage Engineering at times. Many of its products are expensive — sometimes it even seems like they’re actively trolling people. (See the $1,599 folding table or $79 tape dispenser.) The focus on design and irreverence can lead to odd interface choices that might frustrate some, too. But there’s a reason the company has legions of fans. Using a well-designed gadget is enjoyable. People splurge for luxury items all the time, and that’s what the OP-XY is: a luxury item. If money is no object and you like pretty music toys, then go for it: the OP-XY is great and great fun.

Photography by Terrence O’Brien. Videos by Owen Grove.