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)
I agree with @segfault that the Syntakt (and Digitakt) fit the bill very nicely. The first two weeks I owned the Syntakt, I spent the whole time exploring it from my couch.
I gotta say, while the S-1 is technically a “rehashed” SH-101, it’s a phenomenal device and I feel that description does it a slight disservice. Four voices means you can do some great pads, and the waveform chop function really pushes it into new territory.
I think the Syntakt has a little too much overlap with the M8 which I haven’t even got my hands on and learnt yet but I’ve just watched a few more videos on the S-1 and it does look very good, especially for the price! Looks like it could make a great little companion to the M8 with a few mini TRS cables. Thanks for the recommendation to look a little deeper into it!