This thing is endless hours of fun. You can arange whole songs by chaining patterns and scenes. The sequencer is very powerful and the manual is written in a language which is easy to understand.
Biggest strong points:
- very hands-on and amazingly fun to use
- powerful sidechain options which are easy to setup (this was very important to me)
- good battery life with option to power with portable battery
- easy to operate once you watch some youtube videos and read the manual
- can sample external sources
- having distortion per sound is great for adding punch to sounds
- very good sequencer with step probability options. You can have different samples per step on a given channel but they all get effected the same if you fiddle with the macro controls as they are on the same channel still.
- chopping samples is relatively easily
- you can automate everything that is linked to the 8 macro knobs including volume, panning, pitch and you can even automate per step and automations are cleared easily
- instant switching between projects (but packs do take some time to load)
- 3.5mm headphone output
- you can pan sounds easily
- beat repeat FX are addicting to play with and you can use multiple effects simultaniously (for example beat repeat + gater)
- novation components (the tool which you arrange your sounds in) is great and it's browser based so you don't need to install any additional software
Biggest downsides:
- this is the BIG one: no audio over USB. Recording songs to your computer means that you have to have an audio card or something that lets you sample into your computer and it will take a lot of planning and thinking ahead if you want to record individual tracks AKA muting and unmuting tracks. I really hope Novation adds at least single channel audio over usb.
- no time stretching
- the pads are not visible in direct sunlight on a bright day and do not dim enough in the dark. You atleast have 2 settings for brightness.
- you can view battery life only when powering on the machine but atleast battery life is great
- some options can be criptic due to the lack of display but a little manual reading really gives you "oh so that's what it's for" vibes
- the FX can't be automated and are also somewhat limited and can't be tweaked in real time. Atleast you can adjust them on your computer and save them to your liking. I hope novation adds some new ones in the future.
Overall a great little machine and it's seriously addicting to just mess around, tweak stuff, try out effects and simply vibe to your creations which can become very complex with note probability, automations, effects and other. It is clearly more focused to be a live performance device tho I have no intention of using it that way. If by some miniscule chance Novation are reading this review - PLEASE... we need better options for recording the sound to a computer.
