So, as mentioned in the “new gear” thread, picked up one of these for a sort of decent price on Ebay.
Immediate reaction, its a decent bit of kit, well put together in the style of those DIY/short run synth box things you see new/small builders produce. Solid top plate with plenty of flashing lights and smartly designed gold paint everywhere. Sides open, but I guess this is a box for desktop noodling, not taking out on the road.
It kind of does what it does. It generates bass lines of 1-16 notes quickly and easily, using five not particularly complex algorithms - spanning scales, arpeggios and slightly greater randomness. You can set the scale type, which covers the usual bases. You can set the octave. You set it going, and the “mutation” control affects the speed with which it switches notes. You can point an LFO at various stuff, modulate accordingly, and, mainly, mess around with the cut-off, drive and resonance of a fairly gnarly low pass filter.
Is it any good and is it any use? Well kind of. It’s pretty simple, pretty fun and slightly hypnotically compelling. With the slight caveat that what it spits out can vary from amazing and inspiring to fairly drab and tedious. And you don’t really know in advance what you are going to get. Such is the way with generative synths, I guess.
I’ve found myself setting mutation on high to speed run through variations until something sounds decent (not always fast) then quickly turning mutation to zero to freeze it whilst I mess around with filters, sample or generally enjoy it as is. When a while later I find myself bored again, I whack the mutation rate up again in search of something else. I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways of approaching things. Then back down again. I haven’t quite got into just setting things somewhere in the middle and enjoying it taking me on a slow generative journey somewhere. But maybe that’s just me. Perhaps I should just record everything and then clip bits that work. Or just set it going and enjoy whatever it does. Who knows? Actually at times, it is fun just to let it go, mess around with the gate length to get some nice plucky percussive sounds, go wild with the filter and enjoy the ride.
Focusing on the filter (which the instructions rightly point to as the main star of the show) - it is definitely decent enough. Supposedly based on the MS-20, but who knows really. The non-resonant HP doesnt really offer much. But the LP filter is fun, if (maybe) slightly granular/lo-res in its movement between steps. Maybe its just an artefact of the choppiness of what this box turns out and just my ears or something to do with the low res visualisations confusing my brain, but the cut-off doesn’t seem to sweep 100% smoothly unless you turn it quickly so as not to notice the joins, you sort of seem to be able to hear the steps as you go. And at times (it is all a bit interactive) the space between not clipping and clipping very much on the filter drive can very small indeed, farting bass is only ever a tweak away. But it is all fun, and not of this should be taken as suggesting it is in any way terrible for what it is, which is basically a marvellously engineered tiny Arduino Nano thingy.
So, is it worth it? Yes if you like little self contained boxes of tricks, that do something quite interesting for not much cash, and that you can drag out to allow friends to mess around for bassline lols (hey don’t judge my social life…). I have a stack of such amusements, and find it hard to not keep on adding to them from time to time.
At roughly the same price as the Stylophone CPM DS-2, it feels somewhat better built, but maybe also slightly less capable and fun (judging them both as cheapish musical toys designed primarily for diversion and amusement, I recognise they are very different categories of thing). But it does what it says on the tin, sounds decent doing it, doesn’t take up much space and looks nice, and thats a pretty decent set of wins. Compared to other small fun short-run boxes such as the wide variety of noisemakers from RC Circuits or JMT, or the Gecko Loopsynth it’s actually pretty well priced for what it is. Does it compare to something like the much cheaper Behringer Grind for bang for cheap bucks? Not really. But there are loads of them around, they aren’t inherently interesting as objects, and this sort of is.
Likely fate over the course of the year? I suspect I’ll spend a few weeks messing round manically with it, stick it on a shelf, remember it a few months later, and then sell it on to someone else to rinse and repeat. But that is as much due to my ADHD as its inherent qualities, which are definitely worthwhile.
Anyhow, enough rambling. Back to twiddling the “mutation” knob. As you do.
