Teenage Engineering PO-33 KO Pocket Operator Synthesizer

Tommy Tranq

Excellent Device for Modern Day Crate Digging

I’ve had the Teenage Engineering PO-33 for a while now. This was the first sampler I ever really got creative with and it really opened my eyes to the world of sampling. First off it’s just way fun. I sometimes find myself just reaching for it and banging out a little riff on the device because the 16 key buttons tuned to a scale are so fun to play. I find the real fun with this as a sampler however is in conjunction with a phone and a music streaming service. I’m an iPhone user and I have an Apple Music subscription. I have a pretty thorough music library and with the lightning to 1/8” headphone adapter I connect my phone to the PO-33, select a random track on shuffle, advance to the middle somewhere, and hit record. So far I have gotten something useable EVERY time with the assistance of a little truncating from within the PO-33. This is my creative take on the age old art of crate digging now with a world of streaming music at my fingertips. The variable high-pass/low-pass filter is very usable and effective for dissecting samples before recording and processing further in a DAW. The sampling on this thing is truly so fun & immediate and is so much quicker than sampling into a DAW with an audio interface. Even though you have to eventually record the PO-33 in, it’s way more fun pitch shifting and filtering on this than using a mouse & a computer for the entire process. I haven’t synced this to any other gear for DAWless jams but I’ve seen videos of it on YouTube and that looks rewarding too.