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 don’t know about the other stuff but the M8 is just mind blowingly great.
For portable versatile stuff like I think you’re looking for theres also the organelle, which seems awesome. Its another teensy based (I think?) beast that runs multiple Pure Data programs simultaneously. That means you can pretty much do anything.
The m8 though, it’s incredible. It’s such a full, polished product. It’s amazing how much power there is in that thing.
FFS man I’m already hyped about the M8 but he’s not going to ship it any faster haha! Patience is definitely not my forte. I’m up to Discord meetup #14 on youtube and each episode is getting me progressively more excited.
Organelle does seem interesting! Thanks!