Yeah, I think I’m going to be getting back into it as a recorder for the Subharmonicon, thanks to the nice uncomplicated clock out. As long as you don’t approach it as a tape surrogate, I’m sure it’s great for that. I do like the MPC One’s ability to drop audio tracks in anywhere, and freely move / chop them and convert them to samples, but the time limitations and the fact it’s giving me sync trouble are strikes against it there.
For anyone with an R16, I did have success routing the metronome to the headphone output and clocking Eurorack with that (via Ears, as I recall). I think the R8 and possibly 24 make this a bit easier, but it did eventually work, with the limitation that you can’t use it as anything fancier than a per-step clock.
That’s how it works though. People always see what it “could be”.
I’ve thought those things about all of the 1010 stuff at some point.
When I focus on what I can currently do with it I’m usually pretty happy with their stuff.
I think the simplicity of the 1010 stuff let’s you use it for a specific focused purpose. In turn, it helps you to get the gear out of the way to make music, and in the case of the BB (Blackbox, Bluebox, Bitbox)…record it!
Plus, who doesn’t like hot outputs!?
Then a crazy update comes out (they usually do) and I get to be surprised.
The Blackbox is an exquisite example of perfect product balance. Anything left out from it, makes total sense. The stuff that’s in there, is so coherent.
I never miss an opportunity, and don’t mind creating one if it isn’t there, on what I’d like to see in the Blackbox that would make it beyond legendary. Two-band eq access to the filter parameters, ratio, gain, attack and release on the compressor, seamless fx and envelope transitions between patches and if they ever make a MKII, two stereo inputs.
But if nothing more happens with the BBox, it’s still the best sampler I’ve ever used.
And I don’t begrudge them this or even think it’s a bad idea (though it’s not something I, personally, need).
But I don’t think they did themselves any favors, then, by dedicating fully half the hardware and UI for recording purposes. Nor pricing it well above other great mixers in the space.¹ It sets up — in me, at least — a kind of expectation that’s not being met.
I suspect this is just the 1010 way. I haven’t followed the Blackbox for long at all, but my understanding is it took a similar path; simple, general purpose, and a little underwhelming for a lot of specific needs, then steadily improving until it met most of them. They make boxes with room to grow.
I’m just at the leading edge of one of those growth curves now and it’s making me cranky
1: A ProFX 12v3 costs 35% less. Sure, it’s larger, but it has mic pres, a bunch of XLR ports and physical faders, and is analog. I’d intuitively expect something that tosses those out to be smaller and cheeper. But the cost curves of miniaturization can be weird.
Surely, not half? All I see is the Edit page, the physical record button, and the UI record indicator
I’m on the train going around this growth curve as well. Hoping for my updates … although the heat that this thing gives out just idling makes me worried it doesn’t have capacity to handle much more
It also gets equal billing in the product description as a “mixer/recorder”.
To be honest, I’d be happy with just some basic transport functionality.
The ability to fast forward and start recording at a specified location has been a feature of pretty much every recording device since tape was invented. Fingers crossed it gets added at some point.
When I route my BigSky from OUT2 to one of the inputs as send, I can hear initial sound from my synth plus sound coming from BigSky (which is initial + processed trail). Do I have only one option to normalize it by reducing Main output volume to zero for the synth channel (or muting it)?
This workflow seems a bit tedious as for every synth going through BigSky I have to mute their respective tracks and increase OUT2 volume
If you mean you want to only hear the wet signal and none of the dry (?) Then muting the synth channel on the bb (and provided your effect has a dry/wet control, then making sure our is 100% wet) will solve your issue.
Edit: keep in mind that going into the bb and out the second out and back in again will introduce a delay of 2ms.
Yep I feel that. A tiny digital mixer can’t compete with something with dedicated knobs, faders, and buttons for every channel. I miss my analog mixer but I’m sticking it out the bluebox for now.
Another option is to pair it with a midi controller and map some of these functions for easy accessibility
So a question that I’ve been trying to figure out myself, without any luck so far, regarding the use of sends/aux to external effects via the out2/headphone outs.
If I were to use a midi controller with it, for example a Launchcontrol XL, would it be possible to map/assign a knob for each channel controlling the amount of send for those external effects like you usually have on a traditional mixer? Or is it only possible to do with the internal effects?
Yep, just tested it! You can MIDI learn the OUT2/CUE sends for each track. It’s really quick: learning from the mixer page, it took 2 seconds to map 6 faders
ETA: in my experience, it’s going to be helpful to have a MIDI controller with control over max/min CC values. The Bluebox taper is pretty heavy towards low dB levels, so the lower half of the fader is not very useful. On the up side, there’s a feature request about it
)
