I’d like to see a quality demo of it’s capabilities.
I had a long run through of the Drop’s capabilities at Superbooth and then got them to show it actually in action. It’s fantastically capable. I think you’ll be hard pushed to find a performance controller that’s got more features.
The real power is that everything can be mapped to anything. You can organise those knobs, buttons and sliders however you see fit. Each can be mapped to control up to 8 things, so you can easily build macro capabilities.
The main way to use it is to design your set so that you take a snapshot of the settings you want at the start of each section of your song, you can manually tweak to your hearts content while you’re performing, queue up the next snapshot for a few bars time, keep tweaking things, manually introduce a breakdown, then bang on time everything will set to the next snapshots settings. Actually that’s not quite right, because I don’t think a snapshot has to control everything, so you could have some things change to the snapshot, and other things remain the same.
It’s got a knob that lets you switch from instant parameter change or to smooth changes. You can configure how long those changes go over, I think it’s something like 4 bars you could have it progressively change over.
There’s two pages, so those 8 columns of physical controls give you twice as much control. The button grid can queue snapshots, launch Ableton clips, or be programmed to emit midi, I think you can pick and choose so you could allocate a few buttons for midi triggers, while keeping the rest for snapshot launching. Snapshots can send programme changes and do so a configurable amount of time ahead of when the snapshot hits, so you can get your Elektron boxes switching patterns in time with no issue. With the right other device/software you can send back to the Drop the values for the LEDs to display, so they can be in perfect sync with any other changes that are going on.
It’s built like a tank and has a ton of connectivity. 4 x MIDI IN/OUT!
It’s got very good MIDI merge capability so you can plug in a controller keyboard and have the MIDI from that and the MIDI from the Drop go everywhere, and you can remap the channel from input to output, which you can control by assigning a button. So he showed how in one snapshot the keyboard controller was mapped to channel 1, then the next snapshot can activate the button that switches it to channel 2. So you can have live perform a section for different instruments in different sections of the song, using the same keyboard, without having to think about what channel it’s sending.
20 snapshots per bank, 20 banks. So the idea is for a live set you can use a bank per song and do really sophisticated transitions between them.
It has a really stable internal clock, but can also be clocked externally. You can load new projects while the clock is running without any issue. So if you had a really long set and for some reason did want to split it across projects you could load the next project without interruption to the music.
I went from “I don’t think I need this, to this is exactly what I need for live performance”, in about 3 minutes.
To me 799 euros seems a very fair price if you need these capabilities. It’s insanely well featured for day one release.
I’ve got a video of him demoing it. I’ll get it edited and uploaded and will link it soon.
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Bo Beats covers it in his video. Cued.
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Thanks for all those details!
What were the top 5 new products that interested you the most?
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Do you know if this is per project? And how many projects you can have saved?
I guess what I’m asking is, once you fill up 20 banks of snapshots for say a live set, can you start over with a fresh 20 banks for a different set, without having to delete what you already did?
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Yeah, the banks of snapshots are saved to a project, so absolutely you can just keep creating new sets and still revisit the old ones. I’m pretty sure it’s got SD card storage too.
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Yeah you could see the slot in Bobeats video. Is this the perfect live/jamming controller? Sure looks that way on paper!
Wonder if you can plug this into Push3 and power it and send MIDI in and out?
I don’t know anything about the Push3 side, but the Drop can be powered by its USB-C port and does MIDI over it.
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Here’s a quick demo of how you might perform with it
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This sounds sick and it looks like its well built. Can’t wait to see more videos on it.
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Thank you for the detailed information. This looks like a superb product, and solves a lot of commong gotchas with live gigging with MIDI gear. Price is not the cheapest but the fact everything works standalone and you can edit/config everything directly on the device means its also a future proof one. Great stuff!
Only thing I’d be interested to know which hasnt been covered yet - are they planning on making this device MIDI 2.0 compatible? that would really open the floodgates going forward, since this is capable of hires controls etc
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This is kinda like the new Novation LaunchControl on steroids haha
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This is exactly what i want, since Bitstream 3x is pretty unobtainable, so well thought out.
799€
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Looks like a seriously useful box of tricks… lots of clever ideas here.
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just a stupid question…can I map the Volume of my Synths on those Faders? Digitakt II, Toraiz AS-1, Boehringer Model D, JX-08, RC-505 MK2, Digitone I…if that’s possible, I’m all In
Ooh good question, that’s going to depend on the MIDI CC implementation of your synths. Certainly anything MIDI CC controllable can be mapped to those faders, but looking at the Digitakt II manual for example I can’t see the master volume control having a CC mapping. You can map the volume for individual tracks on the Digitakt II to a fader. I guess you could use one fader to control the volume of 8 tracks simultaneously, but that’s not quite what you asked.
I guess most synths probably don’t implement master volume as a MIDI CC parameter.
However, I think you could do it if you were also using MIDI controllable mixer. Perhaps the Zoom L6 would do it. Looking here, it seems like you can control a channel’s level with MIDI CC, but I don’t have one to prove it.
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MIDI CC #7 is supposed to control volume, most devices support it AFAIK
It’s a very good idea to include in your morphs/snapshots cuz then you can compensate level issues caused by your modulations/morphs
The fact that you can stack all the snapshots together like OT scenes sealed the deal for me. This is how lock states should also work on M+… which they sadly do not… so with this one, I will be able to work around its shortcomings
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Hey, could you expand on that a bit? What is it about the M+ lock states that doesn’t work with what you’re describing here?
ok wow…if that thing works as imagined, it’s gonna blow some minds, mine included. no more spreading hands and fingers over 4 machines, I mean it’s fun if you got the skills and muscle memory, but I would never play live like that - with the Drop? Immediately 
thanks for clarifying - it would be enough to controll all channels from the DT2 at once just for song parts or transition