I’ve seen this subject discussed elsewhere but never a dedicated thread (at least, I couldn’t find one, mods please merge if I’m wrong).
QUESTION: If you only have your lap to place gear, e.g. on the sofa, perhaps in the park on a bench, what’s your favourite gear in that situation ?
Asking because I’m looking for useful tools for that situation. E.g. if I hear something musical on TV that interests me, the first thing I turn to is the nearest instrument to the sofa, which is always an instrument (bass, guitar) and never anything with a sequencer built in, which might take the musical idea further.
Anything grooveboxy with a sequencer and a few tracks to work with. So any Elektron, Tracker, Novation Circuit, etc etc. bonus points for having the TV hooked up to an Octatrack for instant sampling of whatever, whenever, Cenk-stylee.
Anything that can be powered by a USB battery, so generally a Dominion Club, NTS-1, Typhon or Micromonsta 2, then run through a Monotron Delay and maybe involving a Chimera BC8 somewhere in the mix too.
Roland MC-101 is great for quickly sketching out ideas, it has everything I need to get the basics down, is small yet not too fiddly to use, although it does take a bit of muscle memory to remember some functions, I uploaded a cheat sheet to the files area to help with this. Bonus being able to load project into MC-707 for further work.
Deluge is also quite good for this, though can be fiddly to use for some stuff, but writing parts is very quick and easy.
OP-1 and OP-Z are great, Z is fiddly to use, OP-1 less so but not as geared toward sequencing patterns.
Tenori On is great but limited synthesis (is a rompler)
Nanoloop on gameboy.
Polyend Tracker with USB battery pack, very nice handling if you like the tracker workflow, realtime recording is a bit clunky though.
Monotribe and Volcas are fun and quick although a bit limited for certain things.
Model Cycles/Samples with battery pack for that Elektron workflow.
I think I’d say MC-101 is the best all rounder, it has the right amount of limitations without being too annoying to use, it sounds pretty good, it does have a learning curve but due to its popularity there are lots of tutorials and tips, so a few days of using it and it becomes second nature.
Biggest downside is lack of full voice editing, but random voice generation of selected type, the huge number of decent factory sounds, the soundpacks, and the ability to load your own samples, make this less of an issue.
Been using the Volca Drum into Mini Kaoss Pad 2 lately. Want to try the 1010 Blackbox too at some point, but the BB is also quite good on its own.
The MiniKP2 acts as a recorder as it can print your jams straight to SD card. You can also play back a recording (or imported track) while recording, so you have overdub abilities too. Downsides are that it is a bit noisy and also quite battery hungry and will stop recording if it thinks the battery is too low.
