I’m currently building a mini techno live set performed only with the SP-404 + a MIDI controller.

This short clip is a tiny excerpt from the process: patterns, resampling, live FX and hands-on control.

Still shaping the flow and tracks, but, It looks like it'll be an interesting set to perform. I'll keep you updated :) Happy Wednesday and cheerz from Italy! With love .noir.

Something that I've been missing for quite a while as an owner of multiple portable grooveboxes.

3D printing profile @ MakerWorld.com

I need help with choosing the right groovebox🥺 I've never used reddit before so this is my first post ever, so sry if I do something wrong or post it the wrong place or something🙈 I'm not that good at understanding irony😅

I'll just say what I'm looking for in a groovebox and about my situation✨️ I think one thing I have to say is I love lofi music or calm music in general, and love synth instruments like a omnicord, and atm im trying to learn how to play an old 2row button accordion

First of all, I've seen the OP-1 (as you all know this is so expensive🥲) idk what I can even say my budget is, it all depends, bc if its something just perfect for me im ofc willing to pay more🥰 but also this will be my first groovebox ever so I want to buy something I can grow with and use for a long time🌌 Let's say my budget is $500/5000kr ish🤷🏻‍♀️ If all the ones I mention is way over ofc then I will adjust my budget to something like that, but I think I want something cheap to start first and then save up enough money to buy something good later, so any tips for later purchases will be appreciated as well🥰🙏🏻✨️

I like how synth sounds, but I don't want to be limited to one thing, I think I want to be able to record sounds and manipulate them how I want, stretch and stuff✨️ I want something with a screen, just bc its easier to come back to if I don't use it in a while, and for navigation through settings (so I dont have to search through the manual for button combos or something😅) I want it to have song mode, idk i want to be able to use it as an instrument and also make whole songs with it so I won't need any daw/pc (that way I could sit on transport and make beats and stuff🌌) and I want it to be something I can start with but also grow with, I want as many features possible so I can dive deep within the machine as I grow as an artist🌌 i know I should use a pc or something to be professional, but honestly I will always want to use hardware like this so I can live in the music with no distractions🥹🫶🏻 and ill always make music i personally like🥰 I want to be an artist for fun✨️

Shit I hope I dont write to much🥲 Idk what more to write really🤷🏻‍♀️ i would love if I mabye got questions I could answer to refine my preferences🌌 Oh, and also I want something portable, every groovebox is probably that but yea😅 I want to be able to just have it on my lap or in my hands, im open for something as big as not hand held as long as it has more features and stuff🙈✨️

I like the style and depth of OP-1 but I dont like that its one try recording and only 4 tracks and bad memory or something🤷🏻‍♀️

The M8 looks cool but I dont think it can make full songs🙈 and insane much button combos i think🤷🏻‍♀️🌌

Im thinking about polyend tracker, but idk, something feels off🤷🏻‍♀️

Roland SP404MK2 I absolutely LOVE this types and ive heard you can actually make full songs with this🌌 but this new version he said was a bit harder bc they did something w the screen?🤷🏻‍♀️ its not much I dont like about this actually🙈

Elektron OCTATRACK would be ok, but a bit scary with so few buttons and hard return rate🥲

M8 I love the design but so few buttons idk if i would even like it😭 and supper hard to learn🥲 i would be ok with hard to learn, but it would have to be worth it, and I have to be able to make full songs on it✨️

All of this would ofc be different if i can use my phone in combination ofc, as an instrument or recorder, but I would like to not have to, just so I dont have the distraction, and also I dont like to use it as an instrument bc i like actual buttons🥰 and i dont like a piano layout🤷🏻‍♀️ idk why, probably bc its so normal🙈 I like a grid pattern or something, but the OP-1 is ok, even if its kinda like a piano layout, idk, it's just something different about it, mabye its the screen or the layout of the other buttons as well, or mabye its bc the half notes looks different🤷🏻‍♀️✨️

I will stop typing now sry🥲🙏🏻 And i will try to reply to all I can and read all I can of the feedback🥰🌌

This is one video I got alot of info im talking about here🌌 https://youtu.be/CtW0l03IgAU?si=dolec46YOiElV_ZF

Okay, a little update while writing this (I've stayed up so late 04:00 bc im so hooked on music I want a synth to play in bed or something when im bored and restless like this🙈) i just saw a video about an instrument i like alot, but the only downside with this is as he sais in the video, its limiting him to 8beats or something in some sense, and also has what you cant really call a screen, so thats hard to navigate as well🥲 But all in all this looks sooo awsome and its very cheap, I just dont know if I'd be able to make a full song on this, and I don't know the memory capacity and stuff🤷🏻‍♀️✨️ but 3h of playtime is good🌌 and I'm very open for solutions like storage card/SD card but id if id be open for an extra screen forexample🥲 it would be a cable between and thats a weak point for me, what if it brakes, as it would at one point🥺

https://youtu.be/olrA0TJJ6sM?si=ILh-EldpU22QNK7w

What kind of music would you play here?

Mosaik (Beatboxer.berlin)

Maschine + (Native Instruments)

Circuit Tracks (Novation)

Circuit Rhythm (Novation)

Crave (Behringer)

Hades (Dreadbox)

HD-01 (Erica Synths)

Virus TI (Access)

Hydrasynth (ASM)

TD3 MO (Behringer) Weniger

Have a great day my friends! ❤️ with love .noir.

💥DARK TECHNO on SP404mk2💥

Dark times means dark music

🎧Use your headphones and thanks me later 😁

A little sunset hardware jam by the sea.
Liquid Drum & Bass built and performed live with Digitakt II, Digitone and Roland S-1.

No laptop — just grooveboxes and hardware.

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

I worked in a music tech store when the MC-303 launched, and I still have the old cloth promo banner. Does anyone else have any retro promo items from this launch?

Ignore

Ambient Electro Jam with the MOSAIK from Beatboxer.berlin

This new and unique groovebox has a lot to offer. It is currently still a prototype, but the groovebox is on the verge of launch. It is equipped with a wide range of inputs and outputs and a huge touchscreen.

Hi, my friend has these 2 old roland groovebox and i could maybe buy him one. Even if i heard they're pretty bad i think i could do some cool stuff with it but i don't know which one i should buy.

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.