Looking both cute and classy, Koka’s Pocket Beatbox could be the sweet little multisampling drum machine that you never knew you always wanted.
Coming off like a sort of rustic version of ROLI’s Lightpad Block, this beautifully presented device is made out of stainless steel, bamboo, leather and fibreglass, and offers four pressure-sensitive pads.
There are also three buttons, a rotary encoder, a display, a built-in mic capsule and a power switch.
The Pocket Beatbox can be played by striking the pads, which promise a high degree of dynamic accuracy. Kits can be loaded via an SD card; each one can include 16 multisample banks of mono audio samples (to cover a wide dynamic range, for example) and each of these banks can contain up to 256 samples. This means that you can access up to 4096 samples per kit.
The pads can be played individually or in combinations, and you also have access to an internal synth engine that generates 808-style sounds. Polyphony is 16 voices.
Connectivity includes MIDI I/O, stereo line I/O, a mic input and a headphone jack. Power comes from three AA batteries or a USB-C power bank.
You can reserved a Pocket Beatbox now for €10 - the finished product, which should be shipping by April 2022 at the latest, should cost you no more than €555. Find out more on the Nikoladze & Sons website.
