Retrokits RK008 - midi recorder/sequencer

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This looks fantastic, and Retrokits stuff is rock solid.

Additional info from the facebook post:

A ‘16 songs with 99 ‘loops’ (parts) each which on their part can control 8 seperate tracks wich each can hold 16 midi channels’ - looper

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This is the sort of thing I would’ve jumped on for sure a couple of years back in my more heavily OTB days. Looks great.

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Hold on, it records unquantised, but you can quantise and apply swing later ? That’s not what I would have expected in a midi looper ? (But what do I know, my only actual midi sequencing experience so far is a model:cycles)

EDIT: you can non-destructively quantise later

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I obviously didn’t dive into it now, but is it not similar to Bastl Midi Looper ? Apart from the number of tracks of course, but more as far as functionality goes.

Without having taken a closer look at the feature set I find the design very appealing.

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I’m very interested in a feature comparison, even based only on what we know right now. Maybe @pyna can tell us more ? The final pricing will be interesting WRT the bastl midi looper too.

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Indeed, price will be a big factor in deciding between the two I guess. On first sight, it looks like the RK-008 is Bastl’s midi looper on steroids. :slight_smile:

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Seems Alesis MMT-8 inspired. Pretty cool.

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Watching Retrokits as a company has been interesting. Each new product, slight larger, slightly more complicated. It wouldn’t surprise me that they eventually add the audio side of things too. Retrokits is definitely a company to keep an eye on.

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Does it has midi FX’s ?

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When it was first announced I misread the post and didn’t see the ‘midi’ part of ‘multi-track midi recorded’ and was really pretty excited… I don’t think the RK008 is quite my sort of product though it looks great for what it is.

I hope it’s a success and it inspires them to do something similar with multi-track audio to SD card in that form factor. Something like a budget alternative to the Blue Box - obviously missing a bunch of features but focusing on an easy way to capture multi-track recordings for importing into a DAW later. If you could get that sort of device for the 250 - 300 mark then I think it would sell like the proverbial hot cakes. Sorry… I’m well off-topic now…

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It would be cool, but Retrokits isn’t exactly a budget company, their products are super high quality and packed with features, I would expect their take on a Bluebox to cost even more, not less.

quantize individual tracks, or globally?

from the video, it looks like quantize can be applied per track

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I’m general it seems like it’s a small little box that records unquantised and outputs how it likes … quantised , swing etc

So general assumptions ( cos they’re clever people ) … all tracks , individual tracks , tracks can have their own quantise , tracks can have individual swing ,

Data wise it seems that it can condense things down to a single track , so I presume internally the data stores everything relevant to the note ( note, velocity , timing and midi channel )

In summary
There’s little info in this but presume it can do the basics and some nice extras but you’ll still need to actually write the music , it won’t do everything
:slightly_frowning_face:

what would be the application of this if your setup already includes a midi sequencer?

like what would an artist like Anchorsong get out of this?

I hope there is a suite of Midi Fx wizardry in this thing

making sick tracks like this

I’d use it as a long-form compositional notepad with the OT and the rest of my Elektrons. Develop 16-beat phrases, play them into the RK008, play back through the synths while tweaking, etc.

It needs to be $300 or less, otherwise it probably makes more sense to buy one of the more full featured sequencers. But an MMT-8 in a calculator body would be very nice to have at the right price.

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I used to have an mmt-8, that’s an intriguing thought…