You'll meet some amazing musicians who have been touring for decades and are still playing on the same guitar they got for $800 15 years ago.
And you'll meet people who drop 5 figures on synth gear every year and have never put together a single track.
If you're running a business selling electronic music gear, who would you rather target?
Not to defend Teenage Engineering, but I have seen a surprising number of OP-1s in music videos/live performances of bands I respect. Does that justify its price tag? I feel somewhat certain in saying "no," but I have no expertise. Love its aesthetics though.
It was pricy but still under the $1k mark - pretty standard for a piece of consumer creative gear.
The design made it extremely approachable, which means a ton of techie people who wouldn't be into music gear otherwise still wanted to grab one just to try it and who knows, maybe it'd turn them into musicians.
So yeah, fantastically designed piece of kit. Lots of respect to TE for having brought that into the world.
I think a lot of the frustration directed at TE more recently is due to the fact that that base equation around price/features/quality of the product, which was very good for the OP1, has only gotten worse for later products.
And the OP1 itself, despite being an almost 15 year old product, has gone up in price A LOT (and the 1f upgrades don't justify the bump).
It’s an amazing little piece of gear and is super fun - it’s definitely not for everyone, and requires a different approach to music making that (for me) focuses less on the functional, reproducible aspect, and more on an ephemeral journey that might end in a new track or might just be a jam, but I hardly ever fire it up and walk way not having a good time.
Currently have it wired to a Deluge and a POM-400, and mostly I send some MIDI notes to the OP1 for some added depth. But the synth engine feels so rich and powerful for such a little bugger!
10/10 would recommend and also there’s probably a lot more bang for your musical buck out there (cough couch Deluge)
While not a bad proxy, I would say it is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Especially since many pros have the money to blow on overpriced gear (but perhaps you do too).
My own anecdote: as a kid I wanted to learn electric guitar and, of course being a kid, I shopped with my eyes. My dad bought me a $1.2k guitar. It's still a respectable guitar to this day, don't get me wrong. But if he had instead taken the old electric in the garage (bought for probably $500) and spent a hundred bucks on getting it set up, I would've had a guitar just as good. I know because I dug it out recently and I actually think it is quite nice.
An example to a more extreme degree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klon_Centaur#Legacy
And yeah a musician friend of mine we have a running joke where we'll say something is "a software engineer pedal." Meaning you see them in the home studios of people who make good money doing something else, while working musicians get by with the nearest Boss equivalent.
I've never used an OP-1, wouldn't know how to use one or evaluate it. But I've been on stage with enough of them to get the sense that, if used fully, they can for some approaches to some styles of music, fill the role of several other pieces of gear that would each cost more than what it costs.
So I think this one is both. It's a software engineer's toy, and it's also a workhorse tool for professionals. Honestly an impressive achievement, not a lot of things end up being both in any discipline.
hah, in the world of photography, we talk about "cameras for dentists" (they often have a little red dot on them)
Everything about Teenage Engineering and related synths are toys. You can make real music with their toys but they don't do anything you couldn't do on your laptop.
The stuff TE makes are incredibly high build quality and beautiful toys though. I used to have an OP-1 for a while before I sold it. One of the coolest coffee table toys I've ever touched.
OP-Z was absolutely garbage build quality. It was so disappointing to bring it out of its box after a year only to discover half of the buttons stopped working properly. Aside from the build quality I love that device,
This is a nice story, but I suspect it's rarer than you make it sound. Serious working musicians like serious equipment which tends to cost a lot of money for a good reasons.
But these are also lower volume products, and I agree with your overall point that the music gear industry is kept alive by hobbyists with disposable income.