I really liked the Deluge a lot. If you get everything memorized and develop muscle memory, it’s a really great compromise of sound manipulation and portability. I just don’t need it, not just because of my BB, but in view of the rest of my personal collection of gear. I would call it the one device that I’d be most likely to re-acquire in the future, except I’m not confident such a small company will produce a Deluge mkII (that includes a cleverly implemented screen) any time soon, if ever.
I also circuitghosted my OP-Z today. With that one, the quality of sound is a dealbreaker: the toy-like aspect that’s part of its charm is so limiting for me that the ultra-portability can’t make up for it. The Deluge’s synthesis was at least somewhat flexibly usable.
The beauty of the BB are the 4 outputs. So essentially you can resample something through external FX and back into BB without a feedback loop. The problem with Deluge/OP-1 etc is being confined to their little eco system of effects. The Deluge would be great with more connectivity
Question for BBers, can I throw some songs on the SD card and have the BB work out either the tempo or number of bars if I know one of them?
Example: I have a 3 minute jam, load it on SD card, I know the tempo is 133bpm, then I want to set start and end points for a 32bar span, in other words just extract sections out with bar/beat precision.
Not what you asked but … you can set the sample to be a ‘Clip’ (which you can trim onboard the BB if you want to top n tail the start & end you don’t need)
Alternatively set the sample to be a ‘Sample’; if you leave its ‘Pitch’ as 0 it will play/loop it back as is. There is no bpm auto/calc function for a Sample. In your example, you set the sample as a ‘Sample’ and just set the start & end points and I think it does what you need.
Besides the above two, the remaining options for your sample file are to categorise them as ‘Slicer’ or ‘Granular’
If the trimming’s exact, it’s like @mokomo said - it won’t work exactly as you described it, but it will work.
Essentially, a loop perfectly trimmed, will time stretch without any problem if you assign it to become a Clip.
In general, I’m finding that the BBox time stretches beats very well and harmonic content well enough, though not great. But then I don’t think any time stretch on complex harmonics work that well. I commit to a BPM. For life. And stick to it.
Yeah timestretch isn’t something I use that much either, I prefer to commit to a BPM too, for the use case I described earlier I was thinking of using it for extracting sections of jams to incorporate into a production, which it seems the BB will handle quite well. I like the fact it has multiple outputs too.
A question for the people who have been using the BB for a while: what´s the update experience like? Did the feature set improve since you got it and is there more to expect? I only heard positive reviews on this so far. I´m testing it currently and I´m not really sure if I should keep it since I just got an MPC Live which basically does the same and a lot more and this could just be an overkill.
I like the concept of it though and the formfactor but that alone is not enough to justify keeping it.
Since its launch, it has received substantial updates. Granular mode, extended midi support. multi-sampling and resampling, to mention a few.
In terms of features, I’m sure it’ll never be close to what the Live is. Which is part of the reason I love it. But I can see why the more complete studio approach that the Live has, is more appealing.
I hope 1010 dont get too seduced by big new features to increase sales. There are a few things which need improving -
Adding micro nudge
Making the piano grid screen more useful (perhaps adding scales)
Applying a volume to sample preview
arpeggiator/note repeat
More sequence slots
velocity step edit
I got essentially only two things that would add a great deal for me -
A two or three band EQ. Given the quality of the filter, clearly 1010 know how to work digital effects. I think they could make a great EQ, and it would shape the sound even more before you took it further.
And more slots for the samples, sequences and song clips. The grid navigation view at the top left corner could work as an interface for this. Switch between sets of slots, and you’re good to go to make entire sets with this thing.
You know, I’ve noticed than when you resample this way, sometimes it misses the slice of a second or so. I tend to send the audio out and into the Heat, and then back into the Blackbox input for resampling. But if I do that, and there’s a lot going on - samples triggered, sequences running and all batched from the Song mode - there’s a glitch or two. Like the streaming misses part of a second.
You getting that too, when you resample from the out and back into it?
2 voices in clip mode has my interest. This looks like it would make a great audio loop playback device with overlapping fx tails. Playing back Ableton Session Clip audio style.
And here we go, my first attempt with the Moog Matriach, all recorded and put together within the Blackbox from a series of live jams in the music store:
