I have to wonder why no-one has suggested a Maschine+ yet?
Pretty good timestretching, you can open your projects as multitimbral plugin in Ableton, blazing fast UX for creating new ideas.
You can sometimes score a secondhand M+ for quite a good price these days, because most people dont understand what the M+ is good for and what it isnt (ie they expect just to be able to transfer their desktop Maschine experience to standalone use, this isn’r really the case due to much more limited resources). For me personally, M+ is a great idea starter and a sketchpad, and is at the heart of my home setup.
Wanted to give an update on this. I absolutely did not like the Deluge at all lol - I only gave it about 2 weeks, but I tried using it daily and while I can see why people may love it, it didnt click with me - I can’t even really explain why, but I think mostly a combo of how I didn’t really love how you navigate the device, the overall look and feel of everything, the synth and sampler functionality and layout.
However, I do really enjoy my M8 again, it may not be as immediate as having a step sequencer, but it does really work well for me as a song starter right now.
…there u have it…m8 tracker is a beast, when it comes to just get somethin’ started…where ever…when ever…the only solution u can easily have always with u…which is THE most valid argument for any kind of sonic inspiration, if ur not into phone apps…
and apart from that, more classical stationary…there’s pretty much nothing else, that really makes sense when it comes to first sketching, apart from a good old mpc with jjos or the everlasting timeless ot…really.