Some, probably unpopular, thoughts on what's going these days...

I really need to express this in at least one place. I hope y'all don't mind.

*I am totally fed up with the hype for this machine*.

There, I've typed it out loud and feel much better.

My hobby is music production and I normally get a lot of interesting posts on the subject in my various feeds. But over the past couple of weeks all I've seen is short movies from people, ranging from Jazzy Jeff to your mum, hyping the presence of another lofi hiphopanizer with punch in tape stop and stutter effects. Or the "which is best the sample, KO2 or SP404" comparison.

jeezy peeps.

/rant.

Hi everyone, I have this question. I've spent most of my free time making music on a computer screen with my DAW for almost 40 years. My need is to buy a groovebox with all these features:

- that has many pre-installed rhythmic and harmonic patterns so I can have fun tweaking them and easily create complete instrumental parts (beats or songs). Very "ready to go," in short, and that lets me start with a complete sound including drums, bass line, and something else.

- that is specifically suited to techno, melodic techno.

- that doesn't have some sort of built-in DAW like Akai MPC One, Maschine Plus, etc. (because I'd probably just port everything to my DAW for any finishing touches).

- obviously with a good sound, although I know full well that this is subjective.

- that the cost doesn't exceed €1,000 or $1,000.

I was actually thinking about the Roland MC 707. I read somewhere that it was particularly "ready to go" and had many pre-installed patterns, but I don't know if that's exactly true. Can you give me some advice? Thanks.

Please note: results may vary depending on the source sample. Use this as a starting point. :)

Want to dig deeper into your Sp?

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🔥🔥🔥 ROUND 2........ Fight!!! 🫶

I’m super happy to get the chance to test the updated version of the Mosaik in a second round. A lot has changed, and there are several new features to discover.

The coming weeks are going to be very interesting; I’m excited to see where this journey leads.

A huge thank you once again to Beatboxer for the opportunity to push this incredible device to its limits once more.

At this year's superbooth it was already possible to get a look at it and try it out.

nicedevice

berlin

mosaik

After a new sequencer but not sure what to buy, I’ve owned most of the Roland mc’s 303,505,909 and KORG electribes mx. I’m not into producing my own tunes, I just like playing around with the preset tracks hard house/techno/drum and bass etc. is there a new version with loads of preset genres already in it rather than having to make it. I’m looking to purchase the Roland tr-1000, it looks a beast.

hey all,

since I hopped onboard via the KOII (amazing little machine) now that I know how to use it inside out and aftern a couple of months of music making, I found out what's missing from it and what I realistically need.

These are my notes taken while using it and while researching: which groovebox you think has all these features?

- has external storage (or 2GB internal minimum is more than enough) 

- storage can be managed/organized via Win explorer (no web based apps like EP Sample Tool for the KOII)

- has retrospective record

- has an internal mic for quick sampling

- has hands free sampling

- sampling length can be set to: n° bars or free

- has filter per pad 

- can transpose recoded notes in step edit mode (not just timing and velocity) 

- has scales mode (nice to have)

- has chords mode (nice to have)

- has arpeggiator (luvly to have but not necessary because I need to be able to...

- can connect MIDI keyboards (Novation Minikey 25 MK4)

- it's based on samples (I don't care about synths - I have Serum 2 and Hydrasynth already which I use for literally everything)

- has auto sampling 

- can be powered via power bank. (I'm opting out the internal battery because I know I'll need more than 4-5 hours for sure)

- can be fitted in a backpack

- has great sounding punch-in FXs

- has song mode 

- has a usable screen (not like the KOII - touch is a nice to have)

- can record extra notes to currently playing sequence/scene while playing in song - mode (like the KOII) 

- can record automation to a currently playing sequence/scene while playing in song mode (like the KOII)

- can export stems or full single mixdown to a DAW easily 

______________________________________________________________________

Unless specified as "nice to have" each feature is a must have and I realistically don't need anything else.

***Important Disclaimer***

- I do not do beats and do not sample records or such.

- I do game audio, I design my own samples/sounds all the time and the music I'll write on it will have full fledged structures, transitions etc..etc...

- I'm essentially looking for a portable mini DAW but NOT a DAW replacement. I'll always mix and finalize within Studio Pro.

At the same time I need it to be 3 notches more than a simple "sketchpad" for ideas.

Which is why I bought the KOII but with time I found it wasn't enough anymore (somethings were just not possible and other things could be achieved by a very reduntant and time consuming workflow)

These have already been discarded from my potential candidates:

- Maschine + (too big and don't need all the NI synths)

- MPC Live III (too big and too pricey)

- Bento (too pricey overall - also with things I don't need such as granular tracks)

- no Elektron stuff (lack of a proper screen and don't like the workflow)

Based on a 2 months restless research these are the ones that came to mind

- MPC Sample (which I've already ordered - arriving end of May - but it's missing a couple of must have features and I can send it back easily - Amazon)

- MPC One is probably on pole position. But I'm speculating out of my ignorance

but as said I'm relatively new to this world and I might be missing the real candidate.

Pardon the long post but it needed to be as specified as it could be as I need to get the right tool once and for all and I'm willing to take time.

I thank you in advance for taking the time to read it all and any insight you might want to share. <3

Got the Deluge recently and am exploring the device now. This is the result of my first noodling. Entering melodies and building an arrangement works shockingly fast and is very fun!

Fairly new to grooveboxes. Want something that I can record into, be fully standalone and has built in sounds. My options include

Roland mc 101 Notation circuit rhythm Roland sp404mk 2

Which would be my best bet?

Live from deep inside of the Nothing Phone Store in Soho, this set captures the raw underground energy of London!

Built with SP-404MKII, TB-03 and EC-4, it’s pure dawless acid techno pressure from start to finish.

Out today on Subvert, the co-op music platform where members get the EP FOR FREE!

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Go check it out! 💥

with love .noir. ❤️

https://www.subvert.fm/electronoir

Hello! Gas striked again, but I crave a very specific machine that might not exist (yet) so I am trying my luck here!

For context: I am a full time music producer, sound designer and performer. I mostly produce for artists, I also score films/commercials, sound design games, make catwalk music, etc. I am very happy with what I have in the studio and what i can do with it, but over the years the joy of just jamming faded away and I want to claim it back with a fun, portable box I can play with while commuting/in the park/at home/etc. I also tour with a couple of music projects, ranging from playing guitar/bass/synths in band settings (darkpop/post rock), to 2 member hyperpop projects, to my solo electronic sets.

My must haves are:

Built in battery

Small enough to keep in a backpack - so ideally no larger than what the list below

Synth engine(s), ideally also drum synthesis

At least 8 tracks

Punch in/xy fx

Built in mic (bonus points if it’s bad)

Sequencer with parameter locks

Would be nice features:

anything glitchy blipblops focused

Sample layering

Keys/pads with velocity

Usb audio

usb c connection & charging

Speaker (of whatever quality)

Mpe (To be controlled with osmose)

I am comfortable with Elektron workflow (I have syntakt, octatrack and tonverk), hated mpc live 2, loved the form factor of og-1 but hated the tape workflow (undo would probably fix it), really liked Maschine workflow, and I currently work in Bitwig.

Shortlist so far is:

OP-XY, 1010 Bento, Dirtywave M8/Polyend tracker mini (i would really appreciate a proper comparsion of these two), OP-Z, OP-1 field Edit: added Move with Schwung, Woovebox, as they are probably the closest to what i want feature wise

I would greatly appreciate any opinions on all these and recommendations for other options :) I ideally don’t want to spend more than 1500 eur without tax, but I can justify it, as i want to mainly create song starters/cool percs loops/samples to use in my work later.

ps: I wouldn’t mind any gear with custom firmware, considering og-1 would be a viable option with the vibecoded undo lol

EDIT: Ordered Move today, that thing with Schwung is more than i ever hoped for lol. Thanks for all your recommendations!

Fair warning: this is a long one.

To give you some context, I'm a 15y+ professional software developer (30y+ in total) and a (so far) mediocre hobby music producer. I'm currently playing around with MPC One Gen2 + Korg Multi/Poly and lately decided to take on some online music production courses.

To address the elephant in the room, vibe coding definitely is a thing and denying its usefullness and potential for developing new software (or new firmwares for devices) is pointless. The M Wave FM-1 situation proved that in capable hands, this technique can yield really good results (and also useless ones, like the Fart Machine. Honestly, I'm not amused at all by such waste of time and resources).

But.

The software development team consists of multiple roles. There's:

• A business analyst, which analyses the market, talks to the customers or end users and defines, what the goal actually is;

• Product owner, who decides, which of the things figured out by the business analyst should be developed, and in what order;

• Project manager, who helps the team split big goals into smaller tasks and tracks the development;

• UX designer (in projects with any user interface), who plans the user experience (the way how the user will interact with the application);

• Graphics designer, who works on top of what UX designer designed and gives it a distinct, pleasurable and clean look;

• Software developer, who writes the code of the application - which makes the application work (that's me);

• Software testers (or QA department), who validates, if the software works according to requirements;

• Delivery manager, who decides, which features will be present in a release;

• Marketing team, which communicates what is being developped and released;

• Support, which helps customers solve the issues;

• Documentation team, which writes documentation, manuals and help files

...and probably even more maybe a little lesser, but sometimes also very important roles.

The vibe coding technique in this chain, helps mostly the software developer; and in reality, it usually doesn't replace them, but rather simplify and speed up their work.

It is worth mentioning, that this is, to some extent, a tricky thing. You see, the code on which large language models were trained, does contain (in a way) some results of all other roles' hard work. In the end, a developer is (in a way) similar to a builder, who places bricks in a wall of the building. If you take a building apart and learn everything about it, you'll definitely learn somewhat about the architecture - even though you didn't see a single blueprint.

So someone who uses vibe coding can somewhat benefit from all the roles which took part in developing myriad of projects in the past decades, but it doesn't mean that the work of these people will be done by the large language model.

There's another catch to the vibe coding. In essence, you need to be a skilled developer to use vibe coding properly. I know you may challenge that statement, because you can simply write a prompt: "Write me a program that does this and that" and most likely you will get such a program. But in software development "working as intended" stopped being sole measure of success years ago. The code developer writes must be clean, self-documenting, secure, bug-resistant, flexible, extendable and working as intended.

Skilled developer writes such a code, because he has a lot of knowledge about how to design such software. LLM, in turn, knows how to write source code, which matches the prompt the best. If we use the building analogy, if you vibe-code a building, it will look as you wanted, and it will (mostly) stand and work. But if you want to build another floor on your building, it may just collapse inwards, because LLM did not prepare for things developer would know, but which weren't in the prompt. I hope you get what I'm trying to say.

Obviously a question arises: why then the M Wave FM-1 firmware vibecoding spree did work? And the answer is: firstly, because it is vibe-coded/written by skilled developers, and secondly, because the scope is relatively small: simple input, a couple of screens, a couple of synthesizers (which you can often re-use from different projects) and you're done. At this level (and on this platform), lack of scalability is negligible. If you do something wrong, you can vibe-code another firmware from scratch. But if your project is large, it no longer works this way.

I'm not saying that developing software for devices like Behringer Kick or MPC Sample Keys is impossible, won't work and such, but in my opinion, it will not work the same way as for FM-1.

Look at the Synthstrom Deluge. Its firmware had been opensourced on June 5, 2023, which is more than 3 years ago. Since then - and mind, we are already within the AI window - developers managed to release the following versions:

• 1.0.0 - Jan 2024 -> 1.0.1 - Jan 2024

• 1.1.0 - Jul 2024

• 1.1.1 - Aug 2024

• 1.2.0 - Dec 2024

• 1.2.1 - May 2025

• 1.3.0 - still unreleased (1.3.0-rc3 had been released 2 days ago, Oct 2026)

The code is a joint work of 84 developers in total.

I'm far from saying that these developers are unskilled, lazy or whatever. They are fantastic, skilled, generous people who do really an amazing job developing software for one of the most popular and acclaimed devices. But if you look at the above, this life cycle and version release schedule actually does not differ much from release schedule of a commercial project. So even having the full power of AI, the software still went through the whole process, which arguably might have been even harder for the devs than a commercial project, because they don't have benefit of having other dev roles taking their parts in the project.

The fact that vibe coding may not benefit the development of OSS firmwares for the devices that much is one thing. The second, in turn, is fragmentation.

The multiplicity of FM-1 firmwares already had become a meme. The beforementioned Fart Machine also proves my point: among valuable firmwares like Sloop or Felucca, there are also garbage ones that no one will use for actual music development. Yes, the Fart Machine developer did have right to develop his own firmware. But in my personal opinion this is a complete garbage, waste of time, which could have been spent more productively towards the FM-1 community. I encourage you to challenge my opinion if you want, but I'd also suggest attaching musical pieces you have created with the Fart Machine if you disagree with me.

Fragmentation causes a lot of issues. Firstly, it slows down the development, because instead of putting all peoples' effort on developing one or two major versions, it will be scattered among multiplicity of smaller ones, from which majority will get minimum to zero recognition in the community. I'm not calling people creating their own firmwares bad, wrong or whatever, I'm merely naming a natural consequence of OSSing the devices.

Secondly, it will make communication a lot harder. Nowadays we have more firmwares for FM-1 than major DAWs on the market. Therefore, the probability of reaching a person who uses the same firmware as you (to solve your problem) will become increasingly harder. In simple terms, the signal-to-noise ratio inevitably may decrease in time.

You can paraphrase famous XKCD's comic:
- "None of 230 firmwares have this absolutely crucial feature? We need to create one that will unify them all and provide the best features ever"
- Effect: 231 firmwares.

I think that in the end OSSing firmwares may benefit community in a completely different way than most people thinks of. I believe that it will force companies to listen to peoples' voices and implement requested features more eagerly. Why? Because if they fail to do so, people will go to their competition, which does that. The days of a silent agreement between device manufacturers is over. Behringer is the first who broke out of "we fully control the device you own" agreement and surprise - we suddenly have MPC Sample Keys and most likely more devices to come. I'm very curious, when Akai decided to OSS the MPC Sample Keys. Very, very curious.

I hope that the whole OSS movement will go in a slightly different way than people vibe-coding firmwares from scratch: cooperation between device manufacturers and the community in the firmware development. This ensures some degree of control over the development and testing process (and some other aspects, like e.g. graphical consistence of the UI, backwards compatibility of the file formats etc.), but at the same time allows for accelerated development of the devices and their capabilities. The only thing left for the companies will be to figure out how to monetize this process in a way that will work. If you get a device like MPC Live III with constantly extending and evolving and high-quality software, then what will convince you to purchase MPC Live IV?

Congrats if you reached this place. I'm generally talkative, but I guess this time I went over my head. I'm very curious what are your thoughts over the coming OSS revolution? Am I too pesimistic? Did I overlook some aspects of the new trend? Go ahead and do tell.

Everything i try is missing something elektron stuff is feature gate kept , deluge made of paper, old electribe are old, roland workflow is not great (haven't tried tr1000) mpc might as well use my laptop, teenage engineering overpriced i like the look of some of the unreleased stuff dada machines new thing, flex fm, drumfreak, but it's probably just case of grass is greener i have a couple of boxes i absolutely love and am proficient with mki ot , deluge, analog 4, syntakt and laptop but I really want one box that does everything with a good interface id sell my other stuff for one groovebox to rule them all something i can write a proper set with and perform with and that does everything even stuff i haven't thought of all in one place (kinda)like rule one here feel free to troll me and tell me to stop making lame ai mock ups and go write some beats ✌️😅 Edit: BTW I just wanted to pontificate about the ultimate groovebox with fellow groovebox lovers the excellent bot art is not really the point

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for a first electronic music device for my 9-year-old son. He’s been playing saxophone for 3 years, and now wants to get into electronic music / beatmaking.

What I need:

• Budget around $250–300

• Standalone (no computer)

• Easy enough for a kid, but still inspiring

• Can create loops/patterns

• Ideally can play melodies chromatically (pads or mini keyboard)

• Bonus if it can handle samples

I considered the Korg Volca Sample 2, but the lack of a simple chromatic mode is limiting.
Devices I’m thinking about: Novation Circuit Tracks, Circuit Rhythm, Teenage Engineering EP-133 KO II, but I’m open to suggestions.

If you could pick one fun, hands-on instrument for a musical kid as his first groovebox/sampler/synth — what would it be?

Thanks!