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)
  • G2V@waveform.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Probably too close to the M8 but Polyend Tracker Mini is a smaller version of the Tracker but more portable and battery powered.

    • dizzyOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah defo too close but I did check it out before pulling the plug on the M8. The M8 just has way more features (3 fx per step, built in synths, more effects, etc) and the interface seems way more clever in how it manages to do all that it does with only 8 buttons.

      Thanks for the suggestion though, might help others if they come across the thread.