Arpeggio: the cutest little box of melody from Tangible Instruments

07 Feb 2020 by Robin Vincent |

1,0 / 5,0 | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Tangible Instruments Arpeggio · Source: Tangible Instruments

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Tangible Instruments has announced that it’s taking preorders on its adorable little Arpeggio box. It’s cute, packed full of features and could be the hardware sequencer you’ve been looking for.

Arpeggio

It’s a little hardware box for composing, saving and performing melodies. It’s inspired by arpeggiators you find on a lot of synths but expanded to give you a lot more scope for melody generation and improvisation.

The interface is well laid out and it doesn’t take a second to discover what everything does. A 1-octave keyboard gets you straight into making arpeggios and the Hold button does exactly what you expect. There are 6 different playback modes; up, up/down, down, down/up, sequenced (the order they were entered) and reversed sequence. All standard arpeggio stuff.

Where it gets interesting is that you can save your melodies and either chain them together or trigger them from the keyboard in performance mode. You can save up to 512 melodies of up to 128 notes each. You can put in rests, change note lengths and delete notes as you go.

It’s also a Synth

And it has a synthesizer inside which I didn’t realise to begin with.It’s a dual oscillator virtual analog synthesizer with 24 patches and some instant controls over attack, shape (filter) and portamento. With the synth overlay you can go deeper into the synthesis side and access all the parameters.

Connect to everything

Out the back you have MIDI in/out, CV/Gate out, sync and audio output. Arpeggio can act as a MIDI-to-CV converter and also have Bluetooth MIDI built in. It’s battery-powered and has it’s own speaker so you can be making melodies wherever you are.

Neat

It’s a neat little box and for the arpeggiating features alone it would make for a useful thing to have knocking around. Arpeggio is available for preorder for $249 which feels expensive when compared to boxes like the Korg Volcas or the Behringer TD-3 or Crave. But it has some cool features that might be worth investigation.