Tangible Instruments has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Arpeggio, a portable MIDI arp/sequencer with a built-in synth. It reminds me a lot of the Yamaha QY series of portable sequencers. This little device sets itself apart from Yamaha with an impressive array of I/O ports to get the MIDI out of it.
Arpeggio includes CV, USB, MIDI Din, and even Bluetooth support. I spoke with co-founder Charlie Lesoine about Arpeggio's compatibility with iOS. Since it includes both USB and Bluetooth, I was hopeful that both would be supported:
"MIDI over Bluetooth will be supported for iOS and likely USB too."
The Bluetooth support alone is pretty awesome. Here's hoping for USB as well.
If you're in the market for a portable sequencer/arp this is relatively affordable at $180 for early birds. The price keeps going up as the early bird specials get picked up, with a final retail price of $200. They hope to ship in April next year.
Reader Comments 4
This might have been cool - 10 years ago, but even then the limitation of a singe octave keyboard would have been severely constraining.
Also the price - 200 bucks retail. Come on, it looks like a 20 buck fisher price toy. At least the Teenage Enginering OP1, despite it's plastic looks, really does kick some arse (yeah ok its significanty more expensive). Also if this is going to have the proper MIDI DIN outputs and inputs then this is going to be one fat bastard for it's size, and probably significantly less portable than, say an iPad mini with, say, a Korg nano key.
Sure it's an arp, but there are tons of virtual synths that include an arp function already and a lot of them would appear to offer much more granular arp settings than this does.
Sorry, I'm out.
I've recently become real resistant to buying anything that is primarily plastic. I see plastic, I look for alternatives.
Yeah, this seems like something I would pay $80 for at most. For $200 you can get quite a bit more these days.
I see the appeal of "purpose-focused" gear like this. And especially little self contained things with sequencers & synths.
Look at the iPad dock that has audio i/o, MIDI din i/o, CV i/o, charges the iPad, and has a few hardware controllers (maybe a couple faders, a couple knobs and some buttons). Then use all the apps we have to do pretty much the rest. Um, wasn't there a dock like that with flashy lights?