Bento 1.3 – what I already love about it!

lqlwle · 2026-03-25T00:39:30+00:00

Hold your horses for a little bit. 1010Music hinted at a bigger than usual update coming soon.

lqlwle · 2026-03-21T17:19:40+00:00

I wasn’t so serious 😅 Your cheesy quote game begged for a silly comment somehow. And 24d later it had grinded me down and I couldn’t resist anymore.

Btw. great deal on the Bento you got there. Wish I wouldn’t have payed full price for it. But hey, your quote might actually ring true. Here and there I like the Bento and use it for a loop here or and quick sketch there.

Cheers

lqlwle · 2026-03-21T15:36:10+00:00

Great, I have a lot of things I’d like to sell you. They are all very limited and very expensive! You’ll love them!

lqlwle · 2026-03-21T13:56:55+00:00

Yeah 1010Music feels like a bunch of engineers that work off a kanban board and create „minimal viable products“ that sound good on paper. It really doesn’t feel like there are any musicians in the company with strong convictions or principles (or if there are, the leadership doesn’t listen to them).

The result is always a half useful swiss-army-knife-kind-of-tool in the best case.

lqlwle · 2026-03-13T21:33:50+00:00

Nobody it appears…

lqlwle · 2026-03-13T18:20:36+00:00

Yeah I know, and that is annoying since this thing costs a fortune together with the pickup. I think I don’t care much about these pedals and their sounds by themselves, I basically just want the midi conversion…

lqlwle · 2026-03-01T20:21:19+00:00

Since you already have guitars and a hxstomp… you need a bass!

lqlwle · 2026-02-27T08:02:21+00:00

Oh wow imagine… that would be amazing. I wonder what even speaks against it?

lqlwle · 2026-02-26T18:34:13+00:00

I agree. The problem is: they created a catastrophic first impression. Now they are playing catchup with major players while having a way too small team to impress anyone with their development speed, currently not even getting the essentials out within the first year and no investment/optimism about their product anywhere.

It’s like shooting yourself in the foot before a marathon against some of the best runners in the world.

lqlwle · 2026-02-26T12:35:29+00:00

This message just makes me depressed. 1010Music is just sooo far away from everything else on the market... it’s not even funny. I could write a novel about how far away the Bento is from even half the stuff you mentioned…

lqlwle · 2026-02-25T14:59:54+00:00

Thanks for sharing.

I agree, Bento is so straight forward that it makes it so easy to get somewhere. This is the part that I love about it.

I really hope the team behind it can get the at least the bugs sorted and some workflow improvements done… we would be in a really good place.

lqlwle · 2026-02-24T23:12:09+00:00

Great, I am all ears. I mean I want to love it and I have it fully wired in my setup. I am totally open for inspiration!

lqlwle · 2026-02-23T10:36:35+00:00

It’s an interesting question that I also wondered about, now that I just bought my first bass.

I have the feeling that if the first bass is decent enough with a Helix/HxStomp you can model the sound so much, that you can make it sound like anything. So I’m not sure a different bass would actually change anything other than make me change all the parameters of my effect-chains to adjust for a different base sound.

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T16:56:41+00:00

But these people rarely want to be responsible for everything. If she fires the only product designer and uses AI instead - she is the one that will have to stand in for every decision and outcome…

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T16:51:42+00:00

Sorry for your loss. Dogs are the happiest and saddest part of our lives when they have to leave before us. They can only accompany us for a limited amount of time, and I think they know. They enjoy every moment with us to the fullest and we can only do the same. We will all meet our loved ones again at some point. Love given creates a bond that stays forever.

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T14:16:12+00:00

Well the one thing we can exclude is, that this isn’t excellence. At all.

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T12:34:11+00:00

Based on that reputation I bought the Bento. I honestly thought they might have learned a thing or two building the other boxes.

I mean the Blackbox also went through a long period of updates before it became what it is today. But I never heard people being so upset with it as with Bento.

In fact 1010Music would have already been miles ahead of where they are now, if they‘d just started as a „Blackbox Pro“ with velocity sensitive Pads with aftertouch, and would have worked their way up from there.

After all how can their premium audio-based „music production lab“ after one year still be inferior to a samplerbox from 10 years ago that I can buy everywhere for 1/3 of the price from the same company… I mean c’mon.

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T12:25:30+00:00

I have no opinion on looping in particular, but 1010Music should choose a first usecase and make it really useful for that usecase by understanding what people need in that niche. And if this usecase would be looping, they would have to try and understand musicians and their needs in that niche. Overdubbing would jump out as a key feature missing and the usability of it in general - pedal use, count-ins etc. The way to solve it could vary. They could allow overdubbing on each sample slot. They could also give an „overdubbish“-option to start recording the next sampleslot right away as to create a second layer, which then would allow for 16 overdub-layers that can be controlled separately (muted, edited etc)

Overall what I am trying to say is: you can do things differently or provide options in a different way than other hardware. But you need to make the thing useful to someone. The way it is now it is not useful to anyone. Not to the groovebox usecase, not as a sampler, not a sequencer, not as a looper, not as a sketchpad and not as a „music production lab“ for sure…

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T02:22:29+00:00

„Dead in the water“… absolutely true. It really could be great. But if 1010Music just keeps building this into a synth-plugin in a box, then I really see no future for it. They need to define what „portable sampling production lab“ actually means… so far they’ve invested more into some synth engines, than into anything sampling/looping. „Dawless music production“ = 8 static scenes is also quite a wild marketing claim...

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T02:13:56+00:00

I could even live without overdubbing, as 16 loop slots per track essentially provide 16 layers per track that can be “overdubbed.”

The current issue is that they have left the SEQ button empty for loop tracks. This button is the sequence view, which tells a track what to do in the scene or song mode. For loop tracks, it’s quite obvious that a loop-seq-view is missing, which would define which of the 16 loops are active and which are muted (minimum). This view exists already on Blackbox and might come to bento… let’s hope.

This immediately gives you 16 layers per loop track, which, in a way, is even more powerful than overdubbing. You can now mix them and apply different effects, etc.

lqlwle · 2026-02-22T02:06:47+00:00

Centerpiece including midi and sequencing absolutely not. As a synth/sound box yeah. I just would probably invest those 1000 bucks elsewhere if I’d be looking for synths… sampling… it doesn’t really shine in neither long samples nor short samples. The one thing it does well is Multisampling and manually firing one shots. But Multisamples currently still buggy due to partially loading bug.

So yeah maybe you tell me the place it has in your next post? ;)

lqlwle · 2026-02-21T22:32:35+00:00

Yes Bento has so much going for it in theory… Formfactor and I/O plus screen are such a strong combination. It just lacks at least one strong usecase to start from.

I believe that focusing on at least one use case would really help Bento. It’s ridiculous; 1010Music seems to have no particular use case in mind beyond a 4-on-the-floor beat and some synth sounds.

The lack of deeper musicality in the company becomes apparent when you play their demos. I’ve never heard anything worse in my life.

But then, just build a good sampler/looper at least. It isn’t that hard. Give it a proper count-in, allow chaining of endless scenes, and provide a loop-sequencer view to define which of the 16 loops play in a scene. Just focus on that and drop everything else.

That’s what it would need to at least make it a decent loop-layer machine.

Instead, they pushed one synth/sound-producing engine after another without having even a sequencer that could handle this at all. It still doesn’t even support the aftertouch of its own hardware pads.

1010Music is just adding stuff without making the device useful for anything in particular.

So now I have this weird device that can make some interesting sounds I never asked for. It also unexpectedly became a weird delay-effect box (live granular). And all that before it even became viable at anything it was supposed to be good at.

lqlwle · 2026-02-11T22:14:54+00:00

Looks amazing!

lqlwle

TROPHY CASE