it’s funny how i always end up ignoring my gut feeling, be too optimistic and do the same mistake over and over again (luckily only when it comes to buying music gear)
i keep experiencing the exact same thing with all sonicware products i buy (and eventually end up selling). i bought ambient 0, liked it very much initially. what they call “blendwave synthesis” (essentially a collection of baked-in, morphing bread and butter wavetables) is nice, amazing reverb, relatively quick workflow to come up with something decent from zero etc…
but again i was let down by “weird” design choices like arpeggiator being an only “live play” feature (even if it’s stored as a “play mode” on that instrument, or “palette” as they call it), so you can’t input a chord into your sequence and expect it to arpeggiate. your only option is to record live and they get stored as literal steps (therefore end up being baked in). you can change “pattern speed” by adjusting note length (i guess it’s “per step”?) like setting sequncer speed to 1/2, 1/4 etc at the cost of “step resolution” as in Elektron boxes, but this also changes arpeggiator speed since there’s no dedicated “rate” setting for arpeggio, which is… a weird design choice.
same odd stuff with Lofi 12 XT. it has sample slicing but up to 15??? and initially it wasn’t even possible to slice it in “equal parts”. many people (including me) asked for it and later they introduced it with a firmware update, but this time it splits it into equal parts of X length (again up to 15???) which you have to dial in yourself with those tiny encoders that love to either be unresponsive, or too responsive that it skips 100 ticks at once) which makes it impossible to precisely slice. i even tried to create my own bashscripts etc so i can stitch samples that xt12 would “recognize”. i’ve seen the metadata file (generated for each sample) has lots of room to store (can’t remember fully but i’m confident there was room for at least up to 32) additional slices, but they chose not to. they decided to have this 15 button keyboard (which makes sense with all black buttons being slightly offset) and simply thought “okay then we will have only 15 slices because we have 15 buttons”, which is… weird. being perhaps the only sampler sequencer that has polyphony capability per track at this price range (which is brilliant) design choices like these are big let downs. (there’s sp404mk2 which is imo lightyears ahead in terms of UX, but has one of the worst sequencers i’ve ever seen, even for roland)
stuff like these are really hard to justify as apparently they’re not caused by hardware constraints etc. it’s just design decisions that makes me feel like the designers haven’t used any other contemporary gear for the past couple of decades (even japanese ones) and decided to implement their own distorted “interpretations” of things they read in ancient books, rather than implementing solutions to problems that humanity has solved in many different and practical ways decades ago.
i really want to support this brand, i’m not shy to send support emails and ask for feature requests, and tbh they’re very responsive, massive kudos to that. but there’s something that makes me feel like they just don’t… get it. honestly it’s heartbreaking to see very unique (feature-wise) and approachable (both cognitively and financially) products missing their full potential of being “proper boxes” because of these weird design choices. i’m tired of facing the same type of quirks with any sonicware product, getting disappointed, selling them with a loss and eventually crawl back to my elektron boxes (which have their own problems, but at they don’t have any impractical and questionable design choices) and my beloved deluge (which is slowly becoming the best and most capable groovebox thanks to community firmware developed by amazing developers). what’s more sad is, these are minor software problems that could be resolved in months (if not weeks, or even days) but based on the “insistence”, i don’t think they’ll ever be addressed, because to solve them, first they have to acknowledge them as a problem, and that’s where the real issue lies imo. sorry for the wall of text, i’d just put this on unit on reverb, sell it and never think about it again, but i think the main reason i spent time writing this is just my… disappointment.
ambient 0 could have been a legendary “budget ambient box”, occupying it’s very own unique corner in the industry, but looks like it will end up being just another “beginner” synth with pretty lowkey features like a “note hold” and an okay-ish “shimmer reverb”, which makes me genuinely sad, because i think there are fundamental logical flaws from the design*(er’s… Endo san?)* stand point. i’ll try to find usages for it (like sequencing it with Orca, or Deluge etc) but i’m afraid eventually it’ll end up just being another 5 star reviewed sell on my reverb account.
i can understand these “problems” i flagged may not be real problems for some people or don’t apply to their personal “workflow”, but i wanted to share my point of view as well (perhaps as a warning even), since i haven’t seen such points raised by anyone else with this amount of detail in any other platform a sonicware product is discussed.
Nevertheless, I came up with a quick jam using it. It’s… okay-ish.
sounds great, and what a great sound to be compared to!
