I’ve preordered a Dirtywave M8 which seems like an awesome piece of gear and it’s got me really excited at the prospect of using interesting dedicated hardware machines that I can take to the park or mess with on the sofa.
The obvious ones I’ve come across so far are:
- Korg Volca range
- Roland mini synths and aira compact ranges
- Teenage Engineering OP and POs
But these all seem a little uninteresting to me and just rehashed tiny versions of older gear and/or aimed at lo-fi producers.
Some less obvious ones that have my attention are:
- Monome Norns
- 1010music lemondrop, fireball & razzmatazz (not battery powered but easily powered by a USB powerbank)
- Bastl microgranny and kastl
- Korg NTS-1
- Korg Monotrons
- Audiothingies Micromonsta 2 (again not battery powered but can be via powerbank)
Are there any you know of that fit the bill?
EDIT: Will add more cool things as I find them
- Zoom MS-70CDR - small, relatively cheap, battery powered stereo multi-FX pedal intended for guitars. Out of the box it only does time based effects like reverb, chorus and delay but there’s an easily searchable hack that lets you load any of the algorithms from any of the other digital FX pedals that Zoom makes which gives it distortion, compression, fuzz, amp modelling and loads more! (check this out for more info https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3KO1EbFd4)
Read the title and came in to say… “weeeeell you might be interested in a Dirtywave M8!!” then read the rest of your post :D
My .02 OP-Z it has a specific sound but it’s great for sketchign ideas and the sequencer is pretty fun and can be pretty chaotic.
Norns seeems like it could be portable, but you would need a midi keyboard, powerbank etc. It can be pretty limiting by itself.
NTS-1 seems like a must buy if anything to have as an FX box but I don’t have one.
Not mentioned but “fits the bill” of portable stuff is the Circuit Series. I have a Circuit Tracks and it doesn’t get as much use as the M8, but it’s pretty fun wiht the pads to come up with different loops and ideas
A pack of Kastl 1.5 + Kastl Drums might be fun to hook up together.
Haha I bought the M8 within 10 mins of learning about it for the first time and I’ve since watched hours and hours of the discord meetups on youtube. It’s incredibly impressive piece of kit! Super excited to get my hands on it.
The idea for the norns would be to sequence it using the m8 and the (currently sold out) pre-built version by monome does have an internal battery. The only thing putting me off, even if it were available, is the price.
NTS-1, yeah it’s in my basket now!
The circuit stuff never really grabbed me tbh, not sure why, might have to look into it a bit more.
As for the Bastl stuff, it looks pretty intimidating since I have no experience with any modular/semi-modular gear but might be a fun experiment!
Thanks for your insight!