If you’ve got various pieces of electronic music gear kicking about the place - synths, drum machines and Eurorack, for example - but haven’t got a central hub that’ll enable you to record it all together without a computer and DAW, 1010music’s Bluebox could be the answer.
This is described as a portable audio mixer with multitrack recording, playback effects and more, and has ‘useful’ written all over it.
There are six stereo 3.5mm TRS inputs that are mappable to 12 mono tracks, six stereo tracks or a combination of the two. You can mix and record incoming audio, play back and mix pre-recorded tracks or do both, and all to a standard microSD card.
What’s more, each Bluebox track has a channel strip that includes dedicated volume, gain, 4-band parametric EQ, pan, mute and solo functions. There are also internal delay and reverb engines, available as pre-fader, post-EQ auxiliary sends per mixer track.
Navigation takes place on a 3.5-inch touchscreen that’s accompanied by four physical buttons, eight navigation buttons and three transport buttons, giving you quick access to all the Bluebox’s most important functions. There’s also MIDI I/O so that you can sync effects and use external controllers.
So, yeah, there’s a lot going on here - probably enough to justify the $499 asking price, we suspect. The Bluebox is currently out of stock but should be available in December - find out more on the 1010music website.
