At Superbooth 2025, being held May 8-10 at the FEZ-Berlin, 1010music today introduced Bento, a portable sampling production lab that lets you sample, sequence, and perform with expressive control.
Bento provides advanced sampling, with recording and playback at 24-bit quality. It covers all the sampler bases from chromatic, multi-sampled instruments playable from a keyboard to pad-based drum racks. Plus you get an intuitive beat slicer for loop editing and a granular synth similar to 1010’s lemondrop.
The Bento offers tactile, real time control with a 7” touchscreen, 16 velocity + pressure-sensitive pads, and 8 endless encoders. They say that “The pads feel great and controller response is immediate, with no laptop buffer settings to fuss with.” you can trigger samples, scenes, mix tracks, tweak filters and effects, and more.
Sequence clips using real time or step recording and a vast collection of sampled instruments and loops. Create and edit quickly, with touch input and a piano roll, or use new probability tools. Eight tracks, with four sequences each, let you launch complete arrangements or clips on the fly.
With generous I/O – including three stereo inputs, three stereo outputs, dual TRS MIDI I/O, USB-C host/device ports, and an internal 3-hour battery and mixer with effects – Bento can be the core of a powerful DAWless setup.
Features:
- 7” diagonal color touchscreen
- 16 velocity and pressure-sensitive pads plus 8 endless encoders
- 8 flexible tracks for sampled instruments, slicer, loops, granular or external MIDI
- Scene-based sequencing with real time, step, piano roll and probability tools
- Over 5 GB of samples and 165 patches of fresh new sounds including deeply multi-sampled instruments from pianos to classic synths by Samples from Mars, Soundtrack Loops and Drew Neumann
- FX engine with per-track delay, reverb, chorus, flanger, and phaser with automation
- Extensive modulation system with LFOs, envelopes, and step sequencers
- 3 stereo inputs, 3 stereo outputs, headphone out, USB-C host/device, dual MIDI I/O
- Internal 24-bit resampling, sample streaming from microSD
- Compact and battery-powered for up to 3 hours of portable creativity
1010music Bento Walkthrough Video:
Pricing and Availability:
Bento is priced at $899 USD, with shipping starting later this month.
Gonna take a wild guess that this is going to be like most Blackbox products and require years of firmware updates to get anywhere near what they’re trying to market it as. Besides so many features missing in the beta already, there was no talk about USB audio streaming for sending out or receiving in for sampling.
Don’t pay to be a beta tester. Don’t preorder. Remember what happened Torso S-4 as well. And the OP-XY. And Blackbox’s track record.
It’s a nice looking box though. The knobs don’t align with the screen though. Weird.
what’s wrong with the OP-XY?
When the OP-XY was released, there were major bugs that would crash it, bugs that would delete all your presets, bugs that would delete your projects, sequencer bugs, settings bugs, hardware issues with pitch bend permanently enabled causing everything to be out of tune.
Six months later, it’s in a much better position now but some bugs still exist and there are quite a bit of workflow issues still like not being able to rename your samples, and a bunch of other things that I don’t feel like remembering right now lol
I think, in another 6 months, it will be a fine device.
Oof. That’s poorly designed.
I wonder if those 3 stereo outputs (since DC coupled) can be used to control modular gear with a firmware update + stereo breakout cable.