1010music nanobox lemondrop : new granular synth

Sonicstate said the firmware isnt swappable, I wouldn’t be surprised if they made it that way eventually unless the components are actually different inside in some way. Perhaps the lemondrop has more ram for the sample time, although it might just be streaming off the SD card.

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they could have a nice business on their hands if they did that, introduce an FX box next for pristine purists, then a lofi one etc,

bet they will, as they generically put nanobox on the case rather than named them…

Good Gaz Nick discussion on ‘who is it for?’ - my view, the ‘new modularist’ who doesn’t use eurorack, but likes a selection of little boxes connecting audio and midi on a breakfast tray sized palette

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Yeah I could see grabbing the lemon drop because it is a bit more chameleon like in being more fx like or a synth. I do often feel like granular is a very samey type of sound though, especially with lots of grains at once. I need to look a little deeper into how the grains move and such though. I suppose it’s time to look at the manual.

*oops no manual yet :pensive: @circuitghost can you tell me if the grains move incrementally after they complete playback or if they move smoothly via modulation… I suppose in a similar way that the way digitakt does granular?

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hmm… kinda kool sounding little thing this lemondrop…

a bit sad it’s not multitimbral… 4 parts would be more solid… and no usb audio / midi… maybe later baby?

Elektron should learn something out of it a bring us wavetable / granual box ( Syntakt? ) with more options, if they’re still not working on it…

And yes price… price… for 250$ I would probably get both units and be happy and find a place for both in a live rig, but otherwise I’d better spend 4000$ for Waldorf M + Iridium, seems more solid solution : )

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I like the form factor…but man, is it just me or was that video LONG for only being 1m50sec long? lol.

a ‘play note’ button and a battery would have been good at this price.

I could sound design ‘on the bus’ and just ‘throw it in my backpack’ … apparently a lot of people do that.

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for a poly inst is lacking in the output aux department .thats are nice feature on their previous 1010music products

Watched quite a few videos in hopes of loving these, but as has been said here, the Fireball just makes me want a Waldorf M and the Lemondrop just makes me want a GR-1. Though the Lemondrop could be fun for live bass looping

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these look and sound lovely but £450 buys you a LOT of synthesiser these days and I just can’t get excited about this kind of software in a box. yes i’m cranky and old but for me wavetable synthesis peaked with the Waldorf Blofeld…

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I’ve really liked the GR-1, but to me, the it is just too much at >$1,000. I’m thinking the Lemondrop might be like GR-1 “lite”. Which for me, might be enough for what I am looking for. I’m not really feeling the micro-granny, and there are not that many options for granular synths out there. There are other devices that can do “some” granular, but that is not the focus so their granular capabilities are limited. The $399 price is just a bit more than I would like…but I’m not sure that there are other options that that would be useful to me.

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A scope in this form would be totally amazing but for now I’ve only gone and copped a Lemon pre-order :smiley:

Edit and just cancelled now so…

Besides being able to process the input in real time, is there anything the Lemondrop does that the Blackbox’s granular doesn’t do?

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Wondering the same thing about Lemondrop.

Also wondering if Lemondrop can be creatively tweaked to meet circuitghost’s requirement for “dirty delay” :wink:

has anyone seen any information about what these are based on?
Daisy?

I’m not totally sure if I have it all correct, but a number of the Blackbox granular parameters can’t be modulation destinations (only speed is) whereas in the Lemondrop they all can be modulated. The lemondrop allows you to apply the granular engine to live input (as well as loading wav files) whereas I think the Blackbox only can do granular with loaded samples. Also, I’m not sure about the interplay between the Blackbox’s polyphony and granular engine. The Lemon drop only has 4 voices of polyphony, but 2 granulators and an oscillator per voice and 16 grains per granulator (I think). I think that overall, the Blackbox was built with a different purpose and they added a granular engine that, although capable, the Blackbox isn’t necessarily targeted for that use case. Seems like the Lemondrop was created specifically for just the granular engine. At $650, the Blackbox is over 60% more than the Lemondrop, but you get lots of other functionality. So I guess it depends on what use case you have; broader needs and a general purpose granulator is enough, or want a dedicated granular synth with deeper functionality?

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@rotallytuined Where did you pre-order from? 1010 site itself? Or another online store?

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Amusing how the units are so tiny that in the closeups in the Sonic State review video, their usual hand gestures are mostly out of frame.

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Yeah, I own a Blackbox but I hardly use it, mainly due to the fact that I have so many other devices that take precedence. I do enjoy its workflow though, and even more-so, it’s granular playback. For those reasons, the Lemondrop makes a lot sense to me. I could load it up with all kinds of samples from my other devices and then sequence it with my M8. That would be such a powerful little combo… If only there was a way to sample into it or easily transfer samples between both devices…

This demo shows beat sync, using the onscreen keyboard with scale settings, live input from 0-Coast, a bit more detailed look at the granular controls than what Nick showed

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DV but probs coming from mainland Europe , it that’s a thing…