Razzmatazz review: A delicious (and deliciously pink) drum machine

Earlier this year, 1010music released Lemondrop and Fireball, two surprisingly full-featured synths in incredibly small packages. The company's Nanobox line covers a lot of ground between these two instruments, but neither was particularly well-suited for handling drums. So the company took the same basic hardware, threw in a drum-focused FM engine, along with a sampler, gave the whole thing a playful pink paint job, and dubbed it the Razzmatazz.

>

The latest member of the 1010music family is a rich sounding drum machine with a simple 64 step sequencer. While it may lack some modern amenities you'd expect from a $399 instrument, it makes up for it with a robust set of sound design features. And yes, even 10 months later, the Nanoboxes are still incredibly small.

Material

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

I won't spend too much time rehashing the material since I already covered it in my review of the Lemondrop and Fireball, but here's a quick recap. The whole thing measures 3.75 inches wide, 3 inches high, and 1.5 inches thick - small enough to fit in even the smallest of bags or a large pocket. There's a two-inch touchscreen on the front, plus four navigation buttons and a pair of encoders. On the back, you have ⅛-inch MIDI inputs and outputs, ⅛-inch audio inputs and outputs, a USB-C port for power, and a microSD slot (pre-populated with a 32GB card) for storing samples and presets.

The only noticeable exterior change from previous Nanobox entries is the color. There's no functional benefit to the Razzmatazz being hot pink, but I love it. As I mentioned in my review of Cre8Audio's East Beast and West Pest, synths should be fun. I have nothing against the Korgs, Elektrons and Moogs of the world. But their instruments often take themselves very seriously. And I for one think the synth world could use a splash of color from time to time.

The sound engine

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

At the heart of Razzmatazz is an eight-voice engine that combines FM synthesis and sample playback. Each pad can be one or both, which is quite unique. I can't think of another affordable hardware drum machine that lets you combine FM sounds and samples in the same way. You could just layer the two, but you could also, for example, use a sample from a real timpani for the attack and then let the synth fade out afterwards.

This is a really fun effect and similar to what you find on Roland's linear arithmetic synthesizers from the late 80s like the D-50. The only problem is that figuring out how to achieve this isn't immediately obvious. Since the two envelopes here are simple sustain/decay affairs, you can't just soften the attack and be done with it. Instead, you should assign the envelope to control the volume of the digital oscillators, but set the modulation depth to minus 100%, at which point the decay acts like the attack.

[embedded content]