Andy Jones finds the second in the Nanobox range is a touchscreen, palmsize synth with full-size sound… and price
CONTACT WHO: 1010 Music WEB: 1010music.com KEY FEATURES Touchscreen granular synth with 3 oscs, 4-voice polyphony, 2 filters, 2 LFOs, 2 envelopes, Modulation Sequencer, 2 banks of effects, real-time X-Y fader, 153 presets I/O: 3.5mm connections for MIDI in/out, audio in, audio out and clock in, USB C and Micro SD card (included loaded with presets and wavetables)
Last month we looked at 1010 Music’s Nanobox Fireball, a touchscreen, mini desktop wavetable synth that is one or two tweaks away from genius. This month we have its equally compact sister, Lemondrop. Same concept, different colour and a very different sound.
Lemondrop has an identical workflow to Fireball, so here’s a quick recap. The two-inch touchscreen has four buttons. From the left, a Home button takes you to the unit’s main Dashboard or X-Y performance area, a Layers button opens up a ‘Stack’ of parameters, and the arrow buttons take you to previous screens or modulation options – more on this later. The two dials to the right are for navigating around Stacks and changing parameters (which can also be done via the touchscreen).
The Dashboard screen is central to everything, with options to select new waves for the two granular oscillators or one of five waves for the third ‘thickening’ oscillator. Along the bottom, you touch zones to access filters, envelopes, modulation and effects. Hit the filter option, for example, and then the Layers button to open up a Stack of parameters or select either filter, then use the dials to change parameters.
As well as the filters, you get two envelopes, two banks of effects and a fabulous modulation section. Here you get a couple of LFOs and a Modulation Sequencer for drawing how your modulation changes. A quite beautiful modulation system shows which parameters can be modulated via three ‘box’ graphics next to each. Head to a parameter with an empty box, hit the right button and you’ll be able to select one of 11 sources and modulation amounts. Hit the left (Back) button and the box is now filled, indicating that the parameter will be modulated by your chosen source. Easy!
The X-Y performance controller lets you assign parameters to both axes and perform with them and, similarly, there’s a keyboard option for playing notes – not ideal but it lets you play and hold notes in any scale.
The granular synthesis here is almost the direct opposite of the wavetable synthesis employed in Fireball, breaking the source
