Tekno from Baby Audio was easily one of my favorite plug-ins of last year — it’s a rich, “bend”-able, brutal box with the feeling of hardware drum synthesis. And now it gets a step sequencer, plus a ton of tweaks you might have missed in the first release. And one more thing: iOS users, there’s a mobile version with AUv3 version.
First, on desktop there’s a ton of stuff that we were asking for.
- New Sequencer mode
- New choke groups feature
- Freely assignable MIDI mappings
- New global undo/redo option
- Per-voice Humanize option
- Full kit sample export
- Per-voice randomization lock
- Copy and paste equivalent voices (Tom L&H, Conga L&H)
- Dedicated reverb bus in multi-output mode
- Fixes implemented for all known bugs
All of this makes this feel almost like a V2 release, but it’s a free version bump — and the V1 UI stays essentially the same. To load the sequencer, you peck on the ‘seq’ button at the lower right. (I don’t totally love the organization of the UI areas visually, but it sounds so good and it’s so usable otherwise that I don’ really care.)
Once in the sequencer, there’s quite a lot of features — paying particular attention to the small toolbar on the upper right-hand side:
- Set the transport to free-running, DAW synced, or disabled
- Shorten lanes for polyrhythms
- 32nd note steps (wish you could drag this for other values or flam, but yeah)
- Clear and pattern multiplier (tempo div) options
- Randomization by pattern or per-lane (with two levels — opt-click gives you greater randomization)
- Drag-and drop pattern export
- Drag up and down on steps to set velocity value
I still love using Iftah’s Sting 2 in Live for sequencing, but I’ll be using this, too.
Oh, plus all the presets I made for you run in Tekno 1.1, too — just tested that. Now I have to make some more!
I’m really excited to test this on iOS; I haven’t gotten to do that yet. There’s some fresh competition I haven’t gotten to write about just yet — Bram Bos’ Battlestation, a “generative jamming groovebox” which is really quite different from this. Now with both, there’s every reason to leave the studio, climb into bed, and just program beats under the covers with your iPad.
Go for it. If you missed Tekno before, now with the 1.1 upgrade they’ve brought back the intro sale.
Baby Audio Tekno — 33% off at Plugin Boutique
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Previously: