Stylophone Beat, East Beast, Kawai K1m Jam

video upload by ChrisLody

"Full Disclosure: I occasionally take on freelance work at Dubreq (they make Stylophones) on an hourly rate producing video content. This video wasn't paid for directly but as a result of my work with Dubreq it is marked as Paid Promotion

Right time for a weird jam! I've been ridiculously busy recently with my day job and music related work so can barely justify taking time off to make this (this is product endorsement which is about as close as I can get to time off at the moment 😅), but I risk my channel turning into wall to wall Sonicware news (more of that to come) so I'm trying to find time for a bit of silliness like this!

Dubreq sent me the Stylophone Beat a few weeks back and I've been having some fun with it. For such an inexpensive machine it has surprisingly features. It can play 4 different kits, 4 different bass sound, 4x 32 step patterns, has some realtime playback effects like a filter sweep and pattern length (think stutter mode), patterns can be copied, elements muted etc, the stock sounds are well chosen, really quite good. There are limitations of course, the volume of each sound is fixed, there's no sync capability (although technically the LED flashes at 1ppq so it could be hacked) and the memory is wiped when it's powered down so make sure you record you work. One saving grace in that regard is that it goes into standby quite quickly so this Beat was left on all night with my rhythm programmed in so was still there the next day for me to continue work on. One small caveat is that the drum sequencer supports 16th note resolution but it seems the bass sequencer doesn't, you'll get 8th note recordings. It does support glide though as you may be able to tell from what I've made here. So all in all a fun little machine!

I also bought a Cre8audio East Beast recently and haven't had the chance to use it, so here it is used in the laziest way imaginable with the Stylophone Gen X-1 as a delay effect. It's a very capable little semi modular but I'm not using those features here. I also bought a Kawai K1 which used to belong to former Sonicware staff member Evan Sirchuk, so here's that too playing one of it's presets. That's a really bright sounding bit of kit and I wasn't sure what to use it for at first but it fits in nicely here. I don't even think I've used that Korg NanoKEY2 for anything yet either and I've had that for years!

Anyway, I don't know how I ended making such an odd sounding jam 😁"