Devices like Yamaha’s Tenori-On or the monome are great, but their pricing is definitely out of the “casual treat” range and well into “serious investment”. Stepping into the fray to sate your button-led retro synth whimsy needs, therefore, comes the $49.99 Bliptronic 5000, a battery-powered 8-bit synth that makes pattern-based music creation indecently straightforward.
Video demo after the cut
The idea is that each backlit button triggers a note, and the step-sequencer moves from left to right at a BPM pace you control with one of the side knobs. The FM synth chip blasts out some pleasingly crunchy sounds – and sports 8 note polyphony – and then the whole thing loops around again, so you can tweak the audio each time. It’s also possible to daisy-chain Bliptronic 5000s together, with each machine clever enough to only start playing its sequence when the previous one has finished; that way you can create longer sequences or have multiple people helping out.
There’s no MIDI and no complex editing functionality, but that helped keep the price down: $50 is, frankly, a bargain. Create Digital Music discussed the instrument’s development with the ThinkGeek team member responsible for it (there’s a photo of one prototype, using switches instead of the 8
