1010music Blackbox - Compact Sampling Studio

This is a great little box if you accept what it is and isn't. Mostly, it's a great box for importing, manipulating, and sequencing/playing samples in an intuitive way. I actually bought it to fill some gaps I had with a Roland MC707 due to sample size limits on the 707. For that it has worked great. I can sequence on the 707 and send MIDI to the BB to fire extra samples and such. Some of the other things I like on the BB are the ability to slice samples and fire the slices. That's very intuitive and fun for chopping up existing beats or vocal parts. Also, the multi-sample auto record feature is really great. I'm currently in the process of sampling a lot of tones from the 707, so I can have good tones to take on the road in a smaller unit. You can use a battery pack with the BB (so long as you get a decent one), so it is portable. While the pads on the BB aren't velocity sensitive, you can use a control to pass different velocity, or edit the velocity after the fact on the piano roll/grid. They also added mute probability and ability to sequence unquantized recently, so that's great. Coming from the 707, the 16 pads and 16 sequences seem a little limiting, but you can load multi-samples to a single pad, so that expands to more samples than 16. Also, it's very easy to merge sounds from a couple pads using re-sampling to another pad. Another thing I use it for is looping and building parts for real instruments or vocals to put together scratch song ideas. It works great for that. So in that way, it's a pretty functional looper. Can't control all from the feet without some complex midi set-up, but don't need that when just writing at home. Another limitation to note is that there are only 2 effects, delay and reverb. If you need more, you'll probably need another device. While they might add some more via firmware update, don't depend on that. Also, I'm hoping they add better per pad EQ, as currently there's only a basic filter.

I own pretty much every groovebox and portable workstation manufactured in the past 10 years so I speak from experience ... and OK I admit there are some notable limitations ... but it's more about how much they've crammed into this tiny box that's barely bigger than my smartphone!!! ... I watched online review videos before I ordered it and felt confident I knew how small it is ... but I opened the box and was shocked that it's even smaller than it appears in photos and videos ... I'm not going to list all of its great features ... you can find all of that out everywhere ... just wanted to convey that it's likely smaller than you're imagining ... which for me is a good thing ... space is running out in my music production studio ... you'll need to throw on a USB smartphone powerbank if you want to go mobile with it ... but even with that hanging off of it it's still extremely compact ... thumbs up!