1010music Bento

1010music’s portable groovebox is the company’s most ambitious product yet.

1010music’s Bento aims to deliver a complete sample‑based groovebox, with everything you need to create a finished track. They’ve taken elements from their Blackbox, some of the granular and wavetable features from their other products, written a completely new operating system and packaged it in a very compelling portable unit with 16 velocity‑ and pressure‑sensitive pads, soft‑click buttons for navigation and transport control, eight endless encoders and a multi‑touch colour LCD screen.

The competition for sample‑based grooveboxes is fierce. Will the Bento be able to compete with mature products like the Akai MPC range, Elektron’s many offerings, Polyend’s Tracker and Play, and others? Let’s find out.

Bento Box

The Bento measures 204 x 218 x 51mm and weighs just under a kilogram. The enclosure is made from rugged plastic; it feels solid and well made. The encoders, buttons, pads and screen are all excellent quality. There is even a handy VESA mount on the rear, which is a nice touch.

Power is supplied via USB‑C or the internal battery, which should provide approximately three hours of life, with a full recharge taking around an hour. There’s no internal speaker, so you’ll need headphones if you’re out and about. There is no built‑in microphone either. Storage is on microSD card, and 1010music claim there’s no limit to the size of the card you can use. The Bento can stream samples from disk, so there are no RAM limitations, but there is a maximum of 576 samples per project, and samples loaded into the granular engine are truncated to 30 seconds.

The Bento is a compact box, measuring 204 x 218 x 5.1mm and weighing just under a kilogram.

The colour LCD touchscreen looks good, although there is a large border, so it’s actually smaller than it might appear. This means that the labels on the screen, which show the soft‑encoder functions, do not align with their corresponding encoder. The screen is multi‑touch, allowing you to use familiar smartphone gestures, such as pinching to zoom and two‑finger scrolling. Navigation and transport controls are accessed via soft‑touch buttons, with dedicated buttons for various editing modes, like the track mixer, clip launcher, song mode, and effects.

Finally, the 16 velocity‑ and pressure‑sensitive pads offer note input. They feel good, maybe not as ‘natural’ as Akai MPC pads, but more than good enough for the job. Pads in this grid‑like layout are great for drums, but less suited to melodic input. To help, each project can have a root note and scale setting to which the pads will adhere. I would have also liked a keyboard‑style option where the lower eight pads were white keys and the upper pads were black keys, but this isn’t possible at this time. The pads light up in whatever colour is assigned to the current track.

Connectivity

The Bento’s slightly recessed rear panel features two USB‑C ports, one for MIDI devices and the other for host connections. Either one can be used as a power source. MIDI and audio connections are all 3.5mm mini‑jack sockets, but there is a generous number of them: two MIDI inputs and outputs, and three audio inputs and outputs. The Bento is clearly designed to be the centre of a modest desktop setup, where you can connect up to three other devices to use the Bento as a mixer or looper, utilise the extra outputs for hardware effects, and synchronise it all via MIDI. A word of warning, however. If you are using the Bento on stage, make sure you connect your setup in a brightly lit room beforehand. The labels on the rear are almost unreadable. They are etched onto the case in a tiny font, with no colouring; black writing on a black surface. Even in a brightly lit room, I had to squint and angle the unit to find the correct port for any given cable.

On the Bento’s recessed rear panel we find a power button, twin USB‑C ports, and, all on 3.5mm sockets, two MIDI ins and two MIDI outs, three audio ins and three audio outs, and a headphone out. And yes, writing this caption did involve some squinting.

Projects

A Bento project can have eight tracks. A track can be either a multisample (for melodic samples), one‑shot (for drum kits), loop (for tempo‑sync’ed clips), slicer (for chopping), granular (sample‑based synthesis), wavetable, or external (for integrating external instruments). You can mix and match track types, except for granular tracks, which are limited to one per project. In the Mixer screen, tracks can be mixed and assigned to one of the three audio outputs. There are also three effects busses (modulation, delay and reverb) plus a master compressor.

Each track can have up to eight sequences, and you can launch them from an Ableton‑like clip launcher. Scenes can launch a selection of sequences together, and Song mode can chain Scenes together to form a song.

Sequences can be any length up to 256 steps, with step lengths ranging from eight bars to 64th notes, which provides ample scope for interesting polymeters and rhythmic experimentation. You can record into a sequence from the pads, or from an external MIDI device, and then edit each note’s pitch, start time, length, velocity and probability afterwards. With the current firmware (version 1.3.4 at the time of this review), it is not possible to record any automation or MIDI data beyond basic note information. Basic copy and paste functions exist for entire sequences, but you cannot copy and paste individual notes or note selections.

The sequencer launcher screen is a simple affair, featuring an 8x8 grid that represents eight sequences for each of the eight tracks. You can start and stop sequences individually by tapping on the relevant pad. If there is a particular combination of sequences you like, you can hit the hamburger menu and ‘Snap Scene’ to create a new Scene that will automatically launch all the current clips together. Up to 32 Scenes can be defined this way.

Scenes can be edited afterwards. They contain a reference to whichever sequences are selected to be played for any given track. Beyond functions to clear, copy and paste scenes, there isn’t much more to it.

Instruments & Sound Design

Let’s take a brief tour of the various instrument types that are available for each track, starting with multisample instruments. Multisample instruments, as you might expect, are composed of multiple WAV files, typically used to create melodic instruments. The Bento comes pre‑installed with a decent selection of pre‑made examples, which is just as well, because creating your own is a laborious task. There aren’t the tools on board to make it feasible. You must meticulously prepare your multisamples on a computer, including root notes and velocity data in the metadata or in the filenames. Then import them into a new multisample instrument. After this, you can edit instrument‑wide parameters like pitch, level, filtering, looping, polyphony, envelope and LFO, but these apply to all zones, so there’s no keymap editing baked in.

One of the post‑launch OS updates introduced a multisample recorder, which can help you create multisample instruments by automatically recording and generating the data for you. With your external MIDI instrument ready, you set the high and low MIDI notes, the number of velocity layers, and the MIDI channel and output to which the instrument is connected, and Bento does the rest. It’s useful, but not the same as being able to edit keymaps.

One‑shot instruments are for drum kits and effects. Up to 16 samples can be loaded and triggered from a corresponding pad. Each pad has parameters for level, pitch, panning, overdrive, filtering, playback direction, polyphony, envelope and LFO, as well as delay and reverb send (to the global effects). Unlike multisample mode, you can access and edit each pad separately, even changing the start and end points. The most significant limitation here is the lack of layering. It’s one sample per pad. If you want to layer multiple samples, you’ll have to use multiple pads.

Loop tracks are similar to one‑shot tracks. Up to 16 samples are laid out across the pads, but this time the focus is on loops. Samples can either be loaded from disk or recorded live, essentially turning the Bento into a rather capable looper. It can even resample itself. You can set the beat count of each sample, launch synchronisation and mode (toggle, trigger or gate), and the usual pitch, level, panning and effects sends.

The slicer instrument will take a single loop, and give it multiple start points, each on a different pad. Up to 128 slices can be manually added. Alternatively, you can use the auto‑detect function with variable threshold or divide the file evenly into your chosen number of slices. Sadly, the flexibility ends here. You can adjust the level, pitch, panning, overdrive, filtering, trigger modes and modulation, but these changes affect all slices simultaneously.

The granular track is one of two synthesis options. Here, we can load two samples, which serve as grain sources, and mix them with a single oscillator capable of producing the usual analogue‑style waveforms. There are two filters, which can be routed in serial or parallel, two envelopes, two LFOs, and a modulation sequencer. All the usual granular parameters are available, including density (number of grains), size (length of grain), window shape, random panning and start position, detuning, and even tempo‑sync’ed triggering. All of this adds up to a very competent granular engine capable of some superb sound design.

The second synthesisis type is wavetable, an engine taken from 1010music’s Fireball synthesizer. It’s a great‑sounding engine. You can mix two different wavetables with an analogue‑style oscillator. There are two multi‑mode filters, two envelopes, two LFOs, a modulation sequencer, plus a similar modulation matrix to the other engines. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s a solid wavetable synth.

The last track type is used for sequencing and mixing external instruments back into the Bento mixer. You can use Bento’s pads to play and record sequences of external instruments using the MIDI outputs, then mix the audio into the mixer and apply the Bento’s effects.

Modulation

The various LFOs, envelopes and even the granular engine’s modulation sequencer are all implemented in the same way. Each instrument has a modulation matrix. The matrix itself works the same no matter which instrument you use, but the available sources and destinations will change to suit the instrument.

The matrix works slightly differently from standard modulation matrices. Each modulation destination has a row in the matrix to which you can add up to three sources in differing amounts. That’s it. It works OK, but it’s not the most flexible system in the world, and for some instruments, the list of modulation sources can be short. For example, in the one‑shot instrument, each pad is limited to velocity, LFO, mod wheel, MIDI volume and MIDI pan (the last three being MIDI CCs, which cannot be recorded into the sequencer). You cannot even use the Bento’s own pressure‑sensitive pads as a source here. In fact, the only instrument type that you can use pad pressure as a modulation source on is the granular track.

In general, the modulation sources available are adequate but uninspiring. LFOs have the usual shapes and options, plus tempo sync. Envelopes are simple ADSR with velocity scaling. The granular engine’s step sequencer can be up to 32 steps with step lengths from two bars to 64ths, and you can draw shapes with your finger. But that’s as exotic as it gets.

Effects

The effects are also quite rudimentary, but welcome. For modulation effects you can choose between Flanger + Distortion, Chorus and Phaser. It’s not clear why the flanger comes with distortion when the others don’t. The modulation effect can also be sent to the delay and reverb separately.

The delay can be tempo‑sync’ed, featuring a low‑pass filter and optional ping‑pong mode. The reverb is slightly more interesting and has 15 different algorithm variations. There are controls for high‑ and low‑pass filter cutoff, pre‑delay, and even a freeze function.

The effects sound good enough, but there is no modulation matrix. The only potential for modulation is with the send amount from a given instrument. For example, the one‑shot instrument can route any modulation source (for example, velocity) to the reverb or delay send. But even here, there is inconsistency. These options are available on the one‑shot track type, but not in the granular track type.

In Use

Summarising the Bento is going to be difficult. The hardware is excellent, and I have no complaints. But the software feels patchy, inconsistent, and often limited in frustrating ways.

Let’s take multisample instruments as an example. You need to create the multisamples elsewhere or let the automated recording system handle the task. You can’t approach it like many samplers, where you slowly add a sample to a new key or keygroup zone as needed. And the whole multisample is treated as one item. You cannot alter the parameters of a zone independently.

The one‑shot instrument suffers a similar problem, only in reverse. It’s a collection of 16 samples (often a drum kit) that you cannot edit as a whole. You can’t re‑pitch or filter the entire kit, for example.

Sequencing is also marred by limitations. You can record notes, change the length of sequences, and clip‑launch them. But don’t think about recording any automation or MIDI CCs. And the limit of only eight sequences per track, per project, is unlikely to be enough to write an entire song.

To be fair to 1010music, they are publishing frequent firmware updates. In version 1.2, we got the multisample auto record feature, limited MIDI CC mapping (although still no recording), and the Song mode was finally ‘out of beta’. In version 1.3, we got a whole wavetable engine and browser preview (thank heavens!). However, many of these features should have been included from the start.

There are bugs too, and some unfinished features. For example, if you lower the velocity sensitivity below 15 percent, several of the pads will permanently trigger themselves. There are modulation sources for ‘Macro X’ and ‘Macro Y’ which don’t have any corresponding source (that I could find). The battery remaining indicator can be inconsistent. External tracks cannot output MIDI to USB for some reason. I could go on. This is endemic of an entire system which hasn’t had enough time spent on it.

I get it. Small companies cannot spend resources indefinitely perfecting a product. Sometimes they need to launch to get cash flowing to continue the good work. It’s not that I don’t like the Bento. The form factor has huge potential, and the hardware seems robust. The granular engine is fun and sounds good. The loop instrument mode is great. In fact, live looping is one of the Bento’s strongest areas (I had great fun recording external loops into slots that already had microloop, reversing, pitch‑shifting, filtering and more enabled, and instantly hearing them play back without stopping the sequencer). But the sequencer, the sampler, slicing, multisampling, song mode and modulation all feel very basic in their current form.

So here’s my conclusion. The Bento doesn’t know what it is yet. Sampler? Full production box? Looper? Granular synthesizer? On paper, it can do all these things, except that many of them feel underdeveloped. I worry that the Bento is trying to be everything to everyone.

The Bento has a great opportunity to mature into something that can compete with the many options in its price range.

You’ve got to admire 1010music. They are a small company trying to launch a product into a crowded market, and I’m all for rooting for the little guy. I sincerely hope that the Bento operating system grows quickly. The Bento has a great opportunity to mature into something that can compete with the many options in its price range. However, the danger of releasing a product early is that you jump too soon. And you know the old adage, ‘don’t buy equipment based on its future potential’. It just needs some time to mature.