Play All Day PlayFader

Play All Day’s debut outing takes a novel approaching to hands‑on hardware control.

The PlayFader stands out against a backdrop of serious synths and black and silver modular, and that alternative vibe is most certainly deliberate. It draws you in and invites you to play. With buttons arranged like an assortment of Chewits and a pair of big DJ‑style faders, it feels like you know exactly what to do. But while it may look like a DJ effects box, it is actually many other things. The PlayFader is a two‑channel MIDI and CV sequencer, controller and button‑laden fun box adventure. It’s unexpectedly deep, well thought‑out, inspirational and, at times, frustrating. You can come up with a fabulous groove in moments, fiddle it about, forget your button combos and accidentally overwrite yourself all with a huge smile on your face. It’s a lot of fun.

It was designed by Play All Day founder Andrew ‘Hadj’ Hadjiantoni, who left a corporate career at Apple to run Ambient Sound & Music retreats in Mallorca and design fascinating controllers. For the PlayFader, he partnered with Jason Hotchkiss of 64 Pixels to provide the coding.

Physicality

The unit itself is a decent Game Boy‑sized device encased in recycled plastic, which can be easily swapped out for a more subdued colour. The top cover that protects the controls also fits on the bottom to raise it up a bit and provide a chunkier and grippier form. The Bourns faders have a pleasing amount of resistance over their 60mm throw, but there’s quite a bit of wobble.

On the top end, you will find a row of mini‑jack connections. If you turn the PlayFader over and remove the cover that’s now covering the bottom, you’ll find the corresponding labels. You have two lots of CVs/gates for Play A and Play B, and MIDI or sync in and out, which can be set with a couple of recessed switches. The power socket is on the same row, and in the box you’ll find a braided myVolts Ripcord cable that can plug into any USB socket and supply power to the PlayFader.

Plug it in, and the centre space between the faders lights up with a lovely green segment LED display. The display runs at right angles to the flow of the PlayFader, making you feel you should turn the device into landscape and use the faders as crossfaders. But that’s not how this is supposed to work. This slight disorientation is somehow part of the charm of what we’ll discover is quite a quirky device, and you’ll be surprised at how little it matters.

The PlayFader’s rear‑panel connections include 3.5mm ports for MIDI/sync and two sets of CV and gate outputs. At the farthest right is an input for a 9V power supply.

So What Does It Do?

Either side of the two‑channel controller can sequence or control things, quantised or unquantised. This can be CV and gate or translated into MIDI notes and CC numbers. You can have both the analogue outputs and MIDI working simultaneously.

So, grab the fader to select the note or control the voltage level and hit the white Play A or Play B button to squirt that into your gear. The idea is that you have a running loop into which you capture notes and modulation on the fly. In a couple of taps you’ve got a looping bass line and a melody, or a bass line and modulated filter, or looping modulation running to whatever you want. You can add to it, overwrite it, clear it, rework it or throw on some ‘Fun’ effects.

As a sequencer the fader acts rather like a trombone. You are sliding through all the notes to find the one you want. With a scale enabled, the display will show note letters (sideways) alongside the fader, but, as with the trombone, you won’t hear the note until you blow or, in this case, hit the white Play button. So, to write your melody, you skip about with the fader to find a note on the display and only hit Play when you have the right one. Making it sound good in a live performance is going to take some practice.

Each channel has two recording buffers, so you can have two things captured and flip between them. You can transpose, reset, hold notes or punch in live over the top. You can define the range of octaves or depth of voltage, set up user scales and timing quantisation.

It’s brilliantly simple, clever, and thoroughly engaging. However, getting it to the state of controller bliss can take some novel finger gymnastics and a great memory for button combos.

Preparation, Recording & Fun

I’ve found that to get to the point of PlayFader fluidity you need to do some prep. The first thing is to enable quantisation and change the scale. There are a number of built‑in options, but the most useful is the user scale, where you can choose your own notes and set a root note and octave range. You should now be sliding about over a handful of intentional notes, which will give you a much better playing experience. Scale is also where you can set a voltage range for CV control if you intend to use the channel for modulation rather than sequencing.

Sequencing on the PlayFader happens in real time; there’s no step entry, so you are going to be performing the notes live into a looping sequence of up to four bars, so some help with the timing might be useful. The PlayFader has a flashing metronome, but it’s so snug up against the Fun button that you can’t see it unless you are looking directly from above. However, there is a timing quantisation grid from four steps per bar up to 32nd‑note triplets, which should keep everything together. With scale and time sorted out you’re in a much better position to pull off a decent fader performance.

Recording takes place only when the red Loop and white Play buttons are used in combination. Tap the red button while you’re playing to capture the next note, or hold it to capture a few in a row. Or you can start by holding the red button and then add a single note with the white button, let it loop around and add another. Other button combos let you erase notes and clear the buffer to start again. Tapping in a quick sequence or building one up, provided you’ve done your prep, is really quite effortless. It’s an enjoyable way to work with your synths.

With another quick button combo, you can switch to the second buffer and record another sequence or copy the other buffer across and drop in some variations. You do, of course, have a whole other channel to play with.

Recording CV works in exactly the same way but without a scale or grid. It’s worth pointing out that CV is only transmitted when you press the white Play button. You can sometimes wonder why the filter you’re trying to control stays resolutely unmoved when you move the fader and see the display move in response.

Under the orange Fun button, we have a range of effects that will either transform or replace our loops with bursts of performance‑friendly happenings. The effects in question are Roll, Slice, Sustain, Slew, Random, Bend and LFO.

Roll is your regular ratcheting, Slice loops chunks of your sequence, Sustain holds the gate open, and Slew adds drag to the notes. Random throws in a sample & hold‑style random stream of values, Bend applies a pitch‑shift to whatever is going on, and LFO adds modulation on top of what’s there.

As the name suggests, these can be a lot of fun in performance but also benefit from being prepared beforehand. They are not recordable, so they only happen in the moment. I found that Rolls and Slices are great on sequences, Slew is good in small doses, Sustain and Bend weren’t that useful and LFO and Random were brilliant with CV control.

The PlayFader measures 174 x 108 x 40mm, this last figure increasing to 55mm with the cover on.

MIDI

The MIDI Out and In ports also double up as analogue sync ports, but you can’t use both, so you will need to choose which one you want to use via two switches on the back of the unit. This may trip you up the first time you try to use MIDI, as might the fact that you can turn MIDI off in a menu buried deep within the machine. Annoyingly, I found this to be the default setting. At a basic level, the MIDI mirrors the CV generation and replaces 1V/oct with MIDI notes and CV with CC, but there are a few extras.

From the MIDI menu (Fun+Clear+Play A or B and then double‑tap Latch to keep it open), you can choose between Note, three Chord modes, two CC modes and two Bend modes. Notes are obvious enough, but the Chord modes are interestingly quirky. Chord‑A mode is ‘automatic’ and quantises triads to the chosen scale. With a user scale it will quantise diatonically depending on what notes are present and add in other notes to compensate. It is odd at times but also very interesting and you can push the chords about by changing the notes in the scale. Chord‑C mode is chromatic and gives you major triads regardless of your scale, and Chord‑S mode makes chords based purely on the notes in your user scale. It works well enough once you get the hang of what’s going on, but I do feel like it could do with being able to give you more control over the chord types or maybe even store chord progressions.

The CC option has two modes. The first one lets you allocate a CC number and map it to control a knob on your MIDI synth. The second is the same, but they’ve crowbarred in a second CC that fires out either 0 or 127 when you press the white button. So, in practical terms, you can simultaneously control the filter and turn a delay effect on or off when you hold the button. Note CC sends out the root note at the same time as the gate to add a drone note beneath the control to complement the melody on the other channel. It’s an unusual feature that you might find useful but I end up feeling like I’m in conflict with myself over what I’m trying to do.

Finally, the Bend mode is a regular pitch‑bend mapped to the pitch wheel, and Note Bend also sends out the root note. I found that in Bend mode, the pitch wheel would just flicker as I moved the fader, but if I recorded the movement, it worked fine on playback. This is probably just a glitch that could be fixed in a firmware update.

For two channels of quick and easy sequencing or controlling that’s in your hand, ready for performative music‑making, it’s hard to beat.

Conclusion

The PlayFader gets all the fundamentals right. It is fun to play with, useful, versatile and even witty at times. For two channels of quick and easy sequencing or controlling that’s in your hand, ready for performative music‑making, it’s hard to beat. It has some similarities to the Bastl Instruments Neo Trinity, which does similar note and controller recording on the turn of a knob. But the PlayFader is released from the confines of Eurorack, and you definitely feel that freedom in the faders and the interface.

One thing I think would ease the button combo learning burden would be to have some sort of profile system, where you could store and recall fader setups and instantly switch between them. Currently, to switch from sequencer to controller, I have to find and change the scaling and the time quantisation and, if it’s MIDI, change the function and set the CC number. There is a patch saving system, but this currently only saves the loop data, not the fader configuration. It also pauses playback briefly when loading, which means you can’t smoothly load up another sequence.

Overall, the PlayFader leaves me feeling very happy. The loop‑based sequencing is very immediate and enjoyable; I like how it’s not hardwired into my Eurorack case and I can take it all over my studio for some quick playing in any space and on any device. It’s very versatile; you can see what’s going on, even if it is sideways, and it encourages you to fiddle. You may feel at times like you are battling with the buttons, but with a little bit of patience, you will emerge victorious.

More colours are coming in the next batch so you can have something more tasteful, in case that is a barrier, and the price has also come down to a more realistic €299.