1010music blackbox

Got it for only a few days, but I already love it. It's feature-packed, the interface looks inspired by Ableton Live's (a plus for me at least). It's lightweight but sturdy, lots of connection possibilities. Even if it's quite small, the interface is quite well thought, and you can also connect external MIDI keyboards/controllers. I copied the supplied 8 GB micro SD card contents to a 128 GB one and it accepted it (so yay! for 16 times more storage spage).

The only small negative thing is that, because it's so small, the interface feels a bit crammed, and many options could be hidden behind others, but it's a good trade-off for the size and weight. And 1010music seem to work constantly on the firmware, I see UI improvement from v1.0 to v1.3.

this thing is easy to use, right out of the box.... load one of the factory presets & it brings with it a load of samples, sequences & even a song structure. getting your head round the architecture is a breeze, even with convoluted workflows. the "keys" screen is useable, bit smaller than most you'd find on ipads, but the box will 'host' a usb keyboard, so no real worries there. there's piano roll editing for triggers & polyphonic note playback. it will drive external synths &c at the expense of one or more of the pads.... there are sixteen pads available in each "preset" (which are sets of samples & sequences that can be regarded as a high-level 'state' of the machine); each pad can be loaded with a single-hit sample that can be played with the keys or triggered from the pad or the sequencer, or with a 'clip', which can be automatically time-stretched to fit your master tempo. there are many options within the setup for each pad... looping, pitch shift, basic filtering, adsr... so it's possible to get a useable range out of (say) a single piano sample. no multisample support, but you could spread an instrument over two or more pads if you badly needed to use the box this way. delay (syncable) & reverb, basic but useful. many outputs, & these are dc coupled so you can use them as controllers or audio. I could go on.... you can run up to 16 sequences at once, or chain groups of sequences into songs, with loopable sections.... essentially what we have here is a baby octatrack, & then some. if I could change one thing, I would give it an internal battery. maybe make the audio looping a bit more like an electrix repeater, with an overdub/undo mode. but I'm very impressed. will use this for playing long background loops, for midi looping, for running basic midi sequences, for grabbing audio & looping it.....

It's tiny but/and great. Built like a tank. Very easy to use. And the team behind it is great: they listen to the customers and keep adding features with new firmware updates.

I switched from the Electribe 2 Sampler to the blackbox and I'm glad I did. Yes, the Electribe has more features, but the blackbox has no gaps between patterns and no sample time limit. And it's sequencer is so much faster to work with.

I'll get my sounds and effects from other gear/sources. All I want my sampler to do is record and play samples in a fast and easy way without limitations. And that's exactly what blackbox does best.