First look: the 1010music story we’ve been following for some years just reached its dénouement. I’m holding a Bento right now, and it lives up to the name: compact, lunchable, perfectly sized portions of everything delicious you’d want. It’s a multisampler, slicer, granular, looper, sequencing, production, mixing, FX box for $899.
1010music has been perfecting each element of this. You want mixing. But you also want effects. You want to record and playback audio and MIDI. You want slicing and sampling and multisampling. You might want to play the slices, but you might also want something granular. You need a way to mix that all together and integrate it with your gear.
The bento sets itself apart as a kind of hub. So yes, if you want all-in-one production, Polyend and Ableton have compact boxes. This is the one that can do all that and be a hub for other gear.
And 1010music are clear about this: they want to be able to replace your laptop. If you were wondering how to wrangle other desktop gear and/or modular skiffs into a coherent performance, bento could be the connection.
The specs are impressive. Actually, let’s just start with the back, as they’ve fit a huge amount of I/O:
That’s three stereo inputs, three stereo outputs (plus a stereo headphone out), two MIDI in and two MIDI out (both TRS). There’s USB for the device and USB host.
And there’s a microSD slot so you can store unlimited projects.
- 16 pressure- and velocity-sensitive pads
- 7″ diagonal touch screen
- 8 endless encoders
- Battery-powered or USB-C powered (they promise around 3 hours of battery life in low power mode, which is more than I usually get away from a nearby jack, anyway)
- And it’s 8″ x 8.5″ x 2″, 2 pounds (that’s just over 20cm square, 5 cm width, and under 1000 grams)
The touchscreen is great, but happily there are lots of dedicated buttons, which I was missing on some of their other gear.
It’s a lot of devices in one for that $899 price, without feeling like an underpowered computer crammed into some hardware (apologies to the Akai MPC and Maschine+). But that’s the beauty of Bento: it’s ready to replace your laptop, but it’s not trying to be your laptop.
That’s the beauty of Bento: it’s ready to replace your laptop, but it’s not trying to be your laptop.
- 8 tracks
- Patch browser
- Choose your function for each track: sample banks, multisamplers, slicers, granular, loops, external MIDI
- Complete MIDI sequencing, modulation, and CC control support
- Chop up loops and samples
- Sample right into the device as stereo WAV
- Resample internally (we’ve spoken about how we like this on their other gear)
- Scene- and clip-based sequencing
- Step sequencing, piano roll/pattern editing, probability
- Real-time loop launching
- Stream long stereo WAVs directly from microSD (hells, yes)
- Complete FX: delay, reverb, chorus, flanger, phaser, overdrive with per-track routing
You get lots of extras like a Slicer LFO, too. Live granulation is coming. This is a pre-production unit (I think, not sure how close it is to production), and I’m still testing firmware – so consider this a preview, not a review, but I expect to use the hell out of this thing.
Modes:
- One-shots (16 of them) with step sequencing
- Loops (16 of them)
- Multi-sampled instruments with piano roll editor
- Granular synth – Lemondrop in a track
- Slicer with piano roll editor
It feels fantastically balanced. The layout is completely logical, and the weight and size are really perfect. It’s just heavy enough to feel solid and stay in place as you play it, but without overdoing it.
It’s not a tracker – though you could use this as a mixer/hub with a tracker device. But it does give you extensive, detailed control over effects and sequencing, in addition to Live-style clip launching and full mixing.
I’m going to differ a bit with BoBeats, in that I don’t really think of this as Blackbox 2. It’s more like the sum of all that 1010music has been doing – as if everything has been a design study leading up to this. But this is otherwise a great overview:
These guys having done the full overview, I want to go deeper into the instruments and how you’d use them, so stay tuned for that once I recover from Superbooth. And with inspiration from Andreas Roman, I’d like to bring it back to music production and specific creative examples, just as Florian Meindl and I did on the Eurorack module.
Bento is set to ship the middle of this month. $899 is the current US pricing – no tariff impacts yet.
Previous adventures with 1010music: