1010music Bento

You should probably think about it like the way the sequencer components and song arranger and basically everything except the sound machines themselves of the digitone ii and digitakt ii are effectively identical. By having these shared library components in both machines it means that getting that feature stable in one will for the most part result in a stable deployment in the other and they can improve on both of them quickly. It will be interesting to see if blackbox2 is left as just what it is now or if it gets The New Baby treatment and they stop enabling new features on bento, but at least the shared features should be propagated to both machines.

2 Likes

Could someone share a Discord invite link?

Makes sense.

But Bento users getting more features on a woefully unstable machine is kind of useless. There are fundamental issues with the Bento that make it useless to a lot of users still. For example, I did a live set where i launched stems through looper tracks. All the track started to play out of time after a couple bars. I can’t trust it to be the center of a live set yet.

2 Likes

Does that work?

1 Like

That worked, thank you!

1 Like

ā€œOut of timeā€ is not something that I have ever heard about any 1010music product. Their clock is usually super robust. However, in tandem with other devices, even a robust clock cannot save you from synching issues. So could you please describe what exactly you were trying to do?

2 Likes

I just had it standalone actually.

I recorded loops straight from my DAW, Bitwig into a looper track. Four tracks total, 6 4-bar loops on each track. The tracks differed in tempo by like 3 BPM max. Launched the clips like you would in Ableton and even without changing to a new loop, slowly tracks would move out of time.

2 Likes

Yes, they do but that would be long clips, wouldn’t they?

Each row of clips was between 2 and 4 bars. Each row of clips was the same tempo, the next row could be a different tempo, but within like 3 BPM. Clip length is as like 10 seconds, nothing long

Intriguing! loops recorded with Bento?

Yeah I treated it like a live looper. Recording was finicky but I’ve come to expect that with the bento lol. The process was wrought with bugs, but it worked out after about an hour of trial and error

2 Likes

Ooh … bento got a step-sequencer (beta)

1 Like

Cool - but yeah agree with the video guy, that one shot selection method def needs a fix.

Def has great potential

2 Likes

New beta firmware available (1.5.9) at Discord:

1 Like

Does anyone know if we can browse the available wavetables in a better way than going through each patch? Its very time consuming!

Also, is it just me or is the wavetable synth incredibly basic? It seems like we can…load two wavetables, and that’s it.

I’ve had the 1010music Bento for a few months now and I have to say that the more I use it the more I wonder what 1010music was thinking releasing this device as it is (I’m on 1.5.3). The workflow just ins’t great at all, unfortunately, at least not to me. There should be enough buttons on this to get a fluid, hardware-based workflow going, yet I find myself having to touch the touchscreen incessently for the most banal things. Copy a seq? Touchscreen. Delete (or rather ā€œcutā€ a sequence)? Touchscreen. Load a new patch? Touchscreen. And on it goes. The issue is not only that I have to use the touchscreen a lot more than should be necessary with all those hardware buttons & knobs given, but I have to touch a MENU before I gain access to some (for me) vital functions such as eg Clear Sequence.

Then, in Project Settings I have the choice of selecting a root note, a project scale, swing and the bpm. Tap tempo maybe? No. set rec quantisation (ā€œSnapā€) on/off globally? No. Define a default loop length for the project when recording a new loop? No. It’s not like there’s no space on the touchscreen for these settings, the settings screen is basically 85% empty.

For short sequences, the piano roll editor works decent enough with the touchscreen, but for longer & busier sequences it gets messy quickly…I’ve inadvertendly added notes trying to select notes more often than I find tolerable.

In terms of workflow, I can’t duplicate a scene quickly in the Launch screen (at least to my knowledge), instead I need to duplicate each sequence for each track that I want to have in a scene via that little menu stack on the bottom right of the screen. Track mutes are only available in the Mixer screen so muting in the Launch screen only works by hitting an empty pad on the track that is to be muted.

I feel 1010music tried to do too much here and absolutely didn’t consider a concept for a unified workflow that would bring all its parts together into a functional whole.

I still have hopes for it as a looper device, as a groovebox I feel there are much better options out there at the current state of development.

It’s a shame, the form factor is great and it being battery powered is awesome too. This is my first 1010music device (I own a lot of other gear) and I’ll hold on to it for now in the hope that it will evolve down the line, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone in the current state, I feel a Digitakt or a Digitone or maybe even a polyend play (no experience with that) would give much better value for money than this device in practice as it currently stands.

6 Likes

I’ve seen quite a few people writing this kind of thing about Bento. I was looking at getting one of these as a step up to the MPC Sample, but it sounds like it’s way off being a fun usable machine, at least for now.

2 Likes

Yeah…it feels like there’s really nothing here. It’s like a minimal viable product. Pretty sure mines going back…

2 Likes

Annnd its gone. I just cant on principle pay 800 dollars for a session grid + arranger.

3 Likes

You can browse wavetables and samples by double clicking on the waveform.
And basic? It has 2 wavetable oscillators plus an additional one, 2 multimode filters, 2 envelopes, 2 LFOs, a complex step modulator, a complex mod matrix. Not exactly basic in my books…

1 Like