I’m having a portability crisis!!! I’m fed up with machines on the living room table and cables (I just ordered an Ableton Move for this reason).
I have an SP-404MKII that I love but which is complicated in terms of workflow, and I’m considering a swap (I’m trying to keep my setup small) with this Lofi-12 XT which seems even more portable and simpler/more inspiring and immediate. Its polyphony is also a big plus compared to the DTs.
My questions:
I’ve seen very few (1 or 2) ambient music demos. Yet the Lofi-12 XT’s specs seem ideal for minimalist ambient music like the one made by Keinseier (who is on this forum and whom I love). I’m a little surprised. Any experiences or tracks to share in this area?
Can the envelopes be P-Locked and if so can the decay be as short as that of a DT for example.
Works great for ambient stuff, though infinite triggers aren’t a thing so you have to use envelopes and hold notes and stuff it’s all very doable and generative things are easy to scale lock, more available scales than digitakt, sequencer has cool random jump options, etc. envelope is ASR only but you can get very very long releases and there’s a lot of effect options. I’m hoping for ADSR in the next update.
Basically everything but the sequencer settings and master effects are lockable but you can lock per step probabilities. No bool trigs but it can do whole notes. Can do very granularish stuff with lfos. I’ve mangled samples in lots of interesting ways and at low BPM you could create extremely slow evolving melodies with locks along the way easily. I will say single cycles don’t work on it the way they do with digitakt, you need to give it a few cycles in my experience but fine tuning sample start and stop is easy and you can LFO that stuff if you want.
I made this track with the cydrums and except for the fact that I used its oscillators instead of samples everything else I did directly used features from the sequencer and effects that it and 12xt share, the first half is extremely ambient.
When I get the chance to find some ambient I made with 12xt I can share that too.
Here, I uploaded one I did with the 12XT too. This one was nothing but 12XT using some samples from the stock library I chopped into oscillators and some microfreak sounds I sampled. The live performance → mixtape file thing is so sick, that is literally the exact wav file it saved on the microSD card with zero other touchup. The different “tape” emulations it bounces too have different characteristics apparently, but it’s hard to A/B them without just recording the same pattern a bunch of different ways and that’s a dull experiment since you can just master more in a DAW later if you care.
The music itself isn’t as focused as I’d like because I was still learning how to use it and how to sequence and mix electronic stuff in general, but it was definitely calming and satisfying to make that.
FW update 1.5 just hit! I’ve been wanting external audio in mixtape mode for quite awhile, so sampling my drumsets from syntakt and digitone and running synth parts through this to mixtape the whole song is officially a go. The new master effects are things from cydrums that I haven’t gotten great at but can see are lots of fun for performance and fills. Using ‘OK’ and the d-pad to control snip loop is a really nice way to get some beatstep pro type master step looping in.
Just tried out a few things to see how it’s working and the “start pattern from any step” thing is pretty nice for quickly working on steps deep into a pattern, you just hold the step you want to start from and hit play. Trigger edit view (func+trig) now actually shows the pads involved when you have pad mode activated, which is outstanding.
Exporting patterns as mixdown or stems is also excellent. Sample reverse is super nice too. Just really solid batch of meaningful feature improvements all around here IMO.
What’s new in version 1.5
- Reverse Sample Playback
Reverse One-Shot and Loop modes
- Upgraded Slicing
Expand up to 16 slices
Edit multiple slices at once
- Start Playback from Any Step in the Pattern
Includes support for MIDI Song Position Pointer
- Step Sound Preview
Audition each step without playback
- 4 New Master Effects & Refined Control
• Snip Loop
• Remix
• Isolator
• Compressor (now separate from Sidechain Comp, which now supports external signal as the target source)
- Audio Export
Export patterns, songs, or individual tracks as audio files
- Mix-Tape Recording with External Input Support
- MIDI Note Map feature and additional MIDI CC/command options
- Enhanced GUI and visual feedback
Pads now illuminate in red/green in PAD mode for entered notes
Note-on events are displayed on the LCD screen
Frequency values are now shown on the FILTER screen
Various other improvements and bug fixes, including zero-reset for VEL SENS by pressing the knob, the option to open/close the pattern selection screen, and refined encoder handling.
oooof. i was looking at the website last night and almost posted “nearly a year without updates, has it been abandoned?”
this is definitely good news, i need to give it some time and see if these updates impact the workflow. step preview might really help building some sounds without playing through each time.
I think it was already a complete enough product that I never had issues recommending it to people for lack of FW updates but this one really does address just about all the “it seems like it should do this, why doesn’t it do this” type of complaints I had (though none of them were serious enough for me to sell the thing).
A year without FW updates isn’t really crazy considering it’s not a huge company and they’ve released multiple new synths and updated Ambient0 and SmplTrek in that time as well, so I think the “this product is abandoned” mindset is not really the right one to have vs. “this product is stable and doesn’t need them to constantly put out bug fixes.” As it is they took their time and addressed a whole heap of workflow and feature improvements in ways that don’t require esoteric new key combos and feel natural in the OS. I’ve been seeing more engagement from lofi/hiphop type youtubers with it lately and maybe between the update and the new sample pack it will drive a stronger interest even as the tariffs make throwing the dice on a new synth harder for folks.
The fact that I didn’t use it as much.
But what bugged me and still does is the scanning of that Pool folder and converting samples.
I don’t use tags & stuff. I just wanna be able to browse my folders and subfolders. Every now and then, the bin file was corrupted and had to rescan everything.
Also… I wish it was stereo but this wasn’t a deal breaker.
I did love a few things about it. Being able to grab a synth note and play chords instantly was a major plus.
That being said, I do have other portables like the M8 or Move and I used those more.
but this wasn’t a deal breaker.