Thanks. That and the inability to use the Blackbox as a class compliant interface are strikes against.
But this godforsaken box will not leave me alone.
It is so much more than just a very cool sampler.
I know. I am thisclose to buying one to try out, frankly. Need to sell some things first, though.
I recently got my Blackbox and wow, what a fun little device. I had ordered a Bluebox with no real affinity to the Blackbox but when it came it I was so happy with the quality and the UX that I went ahead and got the brother unit ASAP.
First, I am coming from a place where I had an OP-Z and while I found it fun I never really got out of it anything that sounded like the stuff I wanted it to sound like. The FX and the step sequencer (along with the spark sequencer effects) are fun but perhaps too whimsical for me. I sold it and got a Polyend Tracker instead, and goodness does Polyend have something special with their Tracker. However, I tried composing on it quite a lot and always found the workflow nudging me to dense and frantic compositions. Perhaps that is a āmeā problem but I had such a mental issue with keeping things SIMPLE on the Tracker. Further, I felt somewhat limited in my song composition because for all it has going for it, the Song mode on Tracker is still just pattern chainingā¦ but with a good UI at least.
Soo all this turned me to the Blackbox. I always need to remind myself that hardware doesnāt MAKE the song, I do, but I canāt help myself sometimes by fiddling around too much. The Blackbox paired with my Bluebox is really amazing.
First, the overall quality and sound from this thing is wonderful. I have all 3 outs going directly to 3 of my Blueboxās ins, what a great thing to have so many stereo outputs. I use mine such that my drums like kick, tom, snare are routed to one output and my hats, rides and crashes go on another. In the Bluebox, this lets me EQ and filter them differently, if I want. I use the 3rd I/O for whatever I want to send to my DBA Rooms reverb.
The ability to compose polymetrically is another great quality of life improvement coming from the Tracker. Or, to make it more broad, the ability to launch "SEQ"s independant of bar count. Set your Quant size to less than one bar, or match it to your step length, to bring in polyphonic sequences on top of one another whenever you want. Record this as a Song part, and now there are so many ālevelsā to pad, sequence, and song composition that you are (or feel!) unrestricted from exploring any kooky rhythm you want. The Clip mode for (re)samples is especially clever and useful here, too.
The 3.5mm jacks make it quick work to sample from my phone, for instance. I like that too. The sampler itself is nice. Slicing stuff up is about as easy as youād hope for.
The sequencer is still kind of annoying, I admit, but better once I put on the new firmware. One thing that makes it great is the new unquantized mode and using the encoders to alter your trig placementsā¦ Right now, in PADS view on the sequencer, you can sequence all your samples by touching the grid. There is an EDIT menu and an Event viewā¦ I would love a āTrackerā style addition to this page that let you scroll 2-dimensionally with encoders and place steps without tapping. Maybe in the future. It would be quite nice to place trigs on to the grid without touching and then nudge them later but itās honestly a small gripeā¦ the touch screen is quite decent.
The other main thing coming from the Tracker is you have 16 āpadsā, 16 āsequencesā and they can be played over top one another. So you can live record your samples into a sequence, and then live sequence, and it feels very playable and expressive. The 4x4 grids are kind of MPC-esque which gives it a very instrumental feel. Maybe thatās subjective. The multisampling function makes pads even more powerful than they at first seem. A whole drumkit can exist on a single 16-voice polyphonic pad. Of course, you can also set this to mono if you want the sounds to chokeā¦ or Poly 2, Poly 4, and so on for the number of voices you want to show through. This alone is something I desperately wanted on the Trackerā¦ let me use a single track for chords or drum breaks, please! The workflow of designating a snare and tom beat to separate tracks and resampling feels so āold schoolā compared to this.
In general the Blackbox really makes me feel like Iām the bottleneck. It letās you approach something in either a very basic way, or allows you to break things down into more detailed bits, and that it doesnāt ask you to work a specific way to get the most out of it.
In the Bluebox as a companion, my 3rd Blackbox out can be routed to whatever pedal I have plugged in. My 3 BB outs, plus one for Digitone, plus one for my outboard FX leaves me still another input to mix in. Incredible stuff. Hereās hoping 1010 remakes their Fxbox in this form factor so I can sell my pedalsā¦? 
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Very nice, I like the organic feel. Thereās an apparent simplicity. I wish I could make tracks like these but I always spoil everything with big reverbs and delays.
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Thank you 
So much love for the Blackbox on Elektronauts!
Iām curious, for those that have had it for a while, what are the things that you dislike about it?
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No built in modulators like lfoās or a filter envelope. You can use external modulations with MIDI CCās though. I still would like an lfo though.
Not much else I dislike. Itās a polyphonic sampler and does great at that. Most of itās missing features can be overcome with other external gear hooked up to it.
The new firmware lets you use all of the voices for one pad if you want. So you can use it to multi sample a multi sampled piano and play piano with it if you want.
Haha, I try to say what I dislike and end up saying what I like 
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This intrigues me. Is there any way to easily load in multisample wavs from elsewhere?
Like say for instance, a Voyetra patch / multisample folder from Samples From Mars?
It can autosample an instrument. You just say what notes, how long, what intervals, velocities l, etcā¦ Wait for it to finish and Bobās your uncle.
You can also drop a folder of samples on the SD and just load them. If they have data attached to the wav files or proper naming they will map automatically. Otherwise you can set each sample to a range and key manually.
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Sure glad I asked what you donāt like about it 
wow, so these would automap as a multisample?
If so, thatās impressive, but then again also a little bit of a bummer about the lack of modulation. I saw in the loopop video that there is no resonance on the filters either. Hmmmm.
I have the those sample packs so Iāll give a try sooner than later. Iām pretty confident they will load correctly though.
Agreed, though the CCās help, especially with an Octatrack around (I know you have 2).
The filter does sound good for basic filter duties though.
Keep in mind you also have 3 stereo or 6 mono outs (or any combination) to work with so itās not horrible if you have some external processing capabilities (Octatrack for example 
)
Plus if youāre already modulating or even sequencing it with the Octatrackā¦ you get the idea
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Good points, and I dig that the filter is bidirectional. Iād rather have a bidirectional filter without resonance, that sounds good, than a crappy LPF only with resonance.
Not sure Iād use this with the OTs. Iām mostly just curious about its capabilities as a portable. Lightly considering replacing or supplementing MS with something else. I ruled out the TR-6S as it appears to be a bottomless pit maze of menus in 2 lines of text. The workflow on the Blackbox seems so snappy. I can see the appeal.
But Iāll go back to my original question about what is disliked.
As I typically find with instruments that are so widely appreciated, itās in the things that folks dislike where the interesting distinctions are found.
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Okay, Iāve thought of a few more.
It takes some learning of the machine to figure out itās limits. The CPU can get overloaded if you push it too hard and it leads to crackles in the sound. You have to be aware of these limits if you want a clean seamless sound (especially live)
Also the note stealing isnāt always graceful and requires a bit of envelope tweaking to keep it from popping sometimes. Once again, something that can be overcome, but could be annoying to some. This could improve (and has with firmware updates ) but itās still not 100% there.
The FX are very hungry and limit the unit if you use them.
Itās definitely underpowered and you have to be smart about how you use it.
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Now weāre getting somewhere.
Thanks for these insights.
So I assume some processes are more CPU hungry than others. I see that there are interpolation options. But no mention if timestreching would increase CPU load?
I doubt Iād be time stretching more than 8 samples at once. I doubt Iād even use more than 8 samples at once, though it is nice to have the capability.
I am surprised to hear the FX are hungry, since they are send FX, but I am reading in the manual that there is a āhigh qualityā mode. So that makes sense. Ahhh, takes me back to Ableton 4.0 days where we had to keep that disabled until it was time to render. 
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Definitely a limitation there. I think it depends on how many samples and how far they need to be stretched. But you wouldnāt be able to get away with stretching 16 pads at onceā¦ 8 might even be a āstretchā (see what I did there? 
).
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As Iām sure youāve noticed, I love the Blackbox.
But the time stretching - not always great. You wanna stay close to the original bpm, especially when it comes to harmonic content.
However, I think like @Airyck itās tempting to talk about whatās good about it. We can label out in traditional terms what it does and doesnāt do, but itās the way it all comes together which makes it a unique prospect.
I can tell you what I donāt like about the Model:Samples. And we can have a conversation about that. But Iāve heard your Model:Samples tracks. Like, whateverās going on there, it doesnāt have much to do with featuers but the fact that you interacted with that instrument and it sparked ideas in you, perhaps not the Digitakt wouldāve. Despite its feature superiority.
Thatās the Blackbox. Not its separate can and canāt but how itās wired to blend it all into one.
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So obviously not as good as say, Abletonās timestretch.
How does it stack up to Octatrackās timestretch?
I typically donāt drift beyond 3BPM +/- (prefer to only go + to reduce artifacts)
I actually prefered the Octatrackās time stretch. However, the Blackbox pitch algoritm is superior. Itās an ambient machine right there. It translates even harmonic stuff, quite well entire octaves up and down. Not as in you just transposed it an octave and now it sounds like you just played it like so, but the character it applies to it. Fantastic stuff.
That goes for the filter, too. You should look at the filter more as a very flexible one band EQ, that throws in a little subtle filter character into it. View it as such, and it becomes extremely useful.
I make entire mixes on the Blackbox and sum them through my SSL SiX. And then Iām done. But if push came to shove, I could survive on mixing on the Blackbox alone. The three stereo outs does wonder for both external resampling and external lmixing.
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I donāt really like stretching on anything honestly. Ableton is okay for complex things when you donāt stretch too far.
You ācanā get away with stretching a few loops in clip mode though to match a bpm that isnāt super far off. Most drums are definitely fair game.
I think itās easy to come up with creative work arounds though.
You could stretch a sample, re-sample, and play it back as a normal sample. This would free up CPU for more things.
I have a 256GB card so I can sample without worrying about space. Crap, why canāt I stop saying what I like?
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