Yes a silicon ‘sock’ might work, stretching over the buttons
OPZ if you have a fresh set of samples loaded before the trip. Fast playability, step nudging for push/pull, slick modulation, fx, two way midi, a built in mic, a speaker… It’s the microgroovebox goat for capabilities minus synth/sound creation. Pairing Woovebox, OP-Z, and a small drummy for samples is a powerful combo.
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You do realize you basically described the Woovebox too 
Also they both do drums and samples. Why carry and extra box? I guess he wanted an all in one box.
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Device capabilities and putting those features all together to get you from point A to B is all user preference. The M8 has all the features listed above, and I see plenty of listing for sale on Reverb (prices are falling). I sold mine. OPZ are listed aplenty as well. I punted the OP-1 due to the OP-Z. Different strokes.
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Caveat that I’ve spent way more time with OP-Z, but I would (and have) chose OP-Z over woovebox for a travel companion. I really have struggled to be productive on woovebox at all, and I’m not opposed to learning esoteric groovebox controls by any means. OP-Z has the advantage of being “playable” – a lot of my best ideas on OP-Z come from just noodling around on the keyboard. Woovebox feels more like I need to program everything in, which can be fine but isn’t what I prefer.
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I really hope Woovebox sells like mad so the dev can repackage it into a bigger yet still portable groovebox.
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Thanks. That’s a valid point, and a great insight I hadn’t really thought of. One of the turn offs of the M8 for me was the “programming notes in” style note entry. I have the OP-Z but for me it hasn’t really clicked yet, I much prefer the OP-1 (now have the Field) which is considerably less portable. I’m definitely a noodling around on the keyboard kinda person for starting ideas. I never start with programming in a drum pattern for example.
I often use the OP-1 Field as a controller, which has BLE midi, so that sends midi into Woovebox I’m sure. But yes, the Line module in my OP-Z does afford proper (TRS) midi I/O. But the built in mic and speaker are a big advantage I find on the Field and the OP-Z has these too.
I may be talking myself out of a Woovebox… which is good for GAS but it’s so flexible sound design wise which I love, and in other ways. Maybe I’ll jump into the OP-Z a little more first. But I hate it has no screen… just being able to see a parameter is set to 64 vs “that sounds about right” is a big plus for Woovebox for me.
Woovebox doesn’t have a keyboard separate from the 16 step buttons.
The OP-Z has this…
and it is its main advantage over many other sequencers (including many Elektrons).
Hold a step and enter the notes/sample slices, there’s nothing quicker than that. Precise and easy.
Of course Woovebox is much more capable as a synth, but I do wish that the interface would have more buttons and a different layout.
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I live enter a lot of my melodies on the Woovebox. Sure, I’m only getting 16 bars of it but that seems like plenty for the sort of stuff I’ve been making.
Just queue up your patterns, hit play + write and play them in (helps to set up a kick and snare or whatever first). Then I’ll come back and adjust velocity, etc as I see fit
Oh hey, apparently I’ve posted enough to post a jam. I recorded this with a cheap USB sound card that only has mono input but I think it sounds nice despite lacking that stereo seperation.
woovespace|audio
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This is a great point. Hold a step and press all three buttons of a chord even.
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Just posted an in-depth interview with the Woovebox developer on my new site.
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I don’t know if this will ever be big enough for me but I like the vision and I really hope this succeeds and evolves.
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Not exactly the same obviously, but spec-wise Woovebox seems pretty similar to Deluge, which is a helluva compliment.
I’m also a “noodler” for melodies and one of the annoyances I had with my OP-Z (which was my beloved main music creation tool before developing the Woovebox), is that I found the “keyboard” rather useless for most of my usage scenarios. By far, my #1 gripe being that I needed a solid, flat surface available; it just isn’t handheld friendly. And to be fair, the OP-Z of course doesn’t pretend to be.
As with many things on the Woovebox, there’s method to the madness, and this includes the way you come up with melodies (a video on this is sorely needed, as it is not immediately obvious). At the off-chance you haven’t tried this yet, set your lead track to one of the “follow chord” settings, specifically one of the “trs.x” settings. Note that this assumes you have a chord progression in place that you like.
Now play your sequence and - on the Seq page or in Live mode - observe the behavior of the keyboard.
With the “trs.x” settings you should observe the note pitches shift from underneath your fingers as the chords change (with LgL/“legal notes in the scale” they stay fixed). While this may at first glance seem super annoying/useless, it’s actually incredibly useful for coming up with melodies on a small handheld device. It trades off the necessity - on a traditional device - to hit the exact right button every time in the right scale, for the necessity - on the Woovebox - to hit fewer buttons in a rhythmic fashion.
On the Woovebox, you will quickly find little “islands” - depending on you chosen key/scale - of buttons that you can press in a rhythmic fashion to generate a complex melody or improvisation. For example, the 8-bar melody @ 1:09 in this quick demo track is played exclusively using an “island” of just four(!) buttons (9, 10, 13, 14).
If you want to replicate this to see what on earth I’m talking about here, program the song’s chord progression G-B-E-C, set your lead’s follow chord parameter to “trs.1” and you should be able to replicate the entire melody by only playing key 9, 10, 13, and 14 at the right time.
Likewise, I get to easily “noodle” with more complex chords (like 7th chords - staples for club/lounge and anything more “jazzy”) that are otherwise getting pretty hard to hit playing on a tiny keyboard. It allows me to explore and use/noodle chords I would not have accessed as easily with a traditional keyboard.
Like @rm, I prefer to record melodies live once I got one “noodled-out”, which is a lot easier to do (and memorise) with the mechanism outlined above.
Now, of course, I appreciate some people (like @SonWu) will still prefer having a tiny traditional keyboard and a candybar layout/form factor. Indeed, if that is important to you, then the Woovebox is probably not for you. For the Woovebox it’s something I deliberately moved away from - IMHO a tiny candy bar device with a traditional keyboard just doesn’t work well enough to warrant the realestate, buttons and workflow (in)convience.
Hope this helps anyone!
EDIT: I should also mention that creating a melody this way also lends itself to some really cool auto-improvisation, where playing bars with your melody out of sync with the chord progression yields interesting variations on your melody. It’s like polymeters but at the pattern level.
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Thanks for the insights!
I also just read the interview, very interesting read on more of your intentions with Woovebox.
Btw, I like the implementation of follow chord too…something I wish the OP-Z had 
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Awesome interview! Great to hear the passion from the developer too, and the clear and deliberate design choices. I’m definitely back in the ‘I need to get one’ state of mind again now. 
I hear you! And unlike the OP-1 Field the OP-Z isn’t “lappable” either - can’t just sit it across your legs. OP-Z is both too big, and too small. (With respect to TE)
Super cool
Hopefully I can order soon, and shipping within Australia is sorted since I’m in Adelaide.
Anyway thanks for the detailed insights, can’t wait to have a play!
In the interview above it sounds like you can have midi out notes triggering an external sound which comes back through the line input to go through internal envelope filter and effects… super cool. I was doing that the other day with my 2600 clone… having that kind of flexibility in a handheld is amazing.
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Regarding coming up with melodies. I found on my M8 that you can do crazy (melodic) shit with scales, 1 16 notes pattern and some random pitch changes or chance fx.
And it’s nice that it evolves each repetition. Some sound really nice and I wouldn’t have come up with myself.
I’m expecting the same with Woovebox.
Btw: I have a Siri Shortcut that checks your webpage for “OUT OF STOCK” and when it’s not out of stock it opens the BUY page. I do this a couple of times / day.
So hurry with the stocking until I end up at the looney bin :))
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Well done! I’m just refreshing the page daily in an open tab in Safari. The most complicated shortcut I have setup turns on low power mode any time it turns off. I get AMAZING battery life haha
Completed my first real song. After initially complaining about chord-follow, I embraced the feature for this project. Just an arrangement of “Ein feste Burg”. I Started with the chord track, choosing the appropriate roots/chord-types/inversions as to harmonize the melody within the chord track.
I can’t find the documentation on SLct SAME. It is an interesting feature. If it doesn’t already exist, I’d like a feature to multi-select steps in a pattern, then apply, for example, the same chord type to them. Then run a similar process for inversion, etc.
Problem: I used the ALFO to shape the chord track, to make it syncopated. This worked great. But when I changed the BPM, the effect changed. I determined the reason for this: ALFO and PLFO “hold” are absolute settings (in units of time), rather than settingsrelative to the BPM. The documentation describes how BPM runs through, and is connected to all the settings. But not these ones. I can see the logic in setting the “hold” to absolute values, particularly in regard to shaping the transients of sounds, making them consistent regardless of tempo. However, when dealing with slower moving effects, I would like the option to make them tempo-synced. Is it possible to deal with the “hold” parameters in this fashion? For example, adding negative values that sync with tempo?
Another feature I would like: The option to quiet down the Woovebox in terms of auditioning sounds in so many situations. I think I understand the logic behind this behavior; users need to know how changing a parameter is changing the sound. There is a certain timing of a button push, value turn and button release, that suppresses the auditioning of a sound. But, I am hit-or-miss at making this work. I would prefer that a single short press of a button auditions a step, but all other combinations mute the step. Sometimes I need to hear a specific step, but that step doesn’t correspond to the button used for the setting-change. Making context-menu changes in the chord track can sound totally wacky, and I am considering turning the volume down in this situation to manage the distraction. And, in other contexts, each click of the rotary encoder re-auditions the sound. This eagerness to audition notes, for me, is not ideal behavior. It may, however, be desirable for other users. Wondering if a startup-mode could be added to quiet down this behavior.
My final little mystery for the day: The ALFO (I mentioned, above) effect on the first note of “Ein Feste Berg” (applying a square wave to the amplitude to make the chord syncopated) is not triggering. I tried playing around with a bunch of settings, but to no avail. Plan B, I changed SHft for all the trigs to 50). With some of my other patterns, I also had unexpected behavior on the very first step of the song. Any advice would be much appreciated!
Edit: Thanks to the Dev. for upping the BPM limit. I am using a range of effective BPM that is 1/2 of the BPM of the Woovebox, making versions of “Ein feste Burg” at 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120 and 130 bpm. This range should work for most of the multi-speed versions of canned-music I’m producing.
Edit: Crickets around here! Perhaps the first batch of owners has moved onto their next new thing. I am still putting in time on the Woovebox and learning as I go. I am thinking much more musically with the Woovebox than I did with the Digitone. The Woovebox forces me to be more deliberate about my musical intent.
Comparing a “knob per function” device (of which there are many) to a “single knob many function” device, the Woovebox: I am now motivated to figure out why things work the way they do. Devices with many readily accessible functions cause me to think less about what I’m actually doing.
BIG feature request: After devoting myself for over a month to the Woovebox, the least satisfying thing about it is the “long press” (while dialing in knob values). And the other issue I mentioned above is the the unit’s eagerness to audition sounds.
Dev: Would it be possible to change the default behavior of buttons as follows: A short press of a button activates the knob-function of that button. A second short press *de-*activates the menu. And a slightly longer press auditions a note/chord. I know this is radically different that the default behavior, but it strikes me as way more comfortable to the thumbs and ears. Best wishes!
To the Dev:
There is an inconvenience with the file naming protocol in Wooveconnect that I hope you can address. When more than one file is produced in a day, (1) (2) (3) are added to the file names. This is pretty normal behavior for computers.
However, the Wooveconnect-created files contain an extra blank space in their name, just prior to the (1). I noticed that, for other duplicate file-types (such as when I accidentally download the same file over and over), this white space is NOT included. Is this issue coming from Wooveconnect, or from my computer?
Edit: I got the problem under control, but adding a short script to my workflow that replaces the white-space with an underscore. My workflow is not a fan of filenames containing white-space!
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