First up its the Make Noise Morphagene in collaboration Tom Erbe. A stereo sampler with a classic Make Noise take on typology. It may well not be entirely obvious this is a sampler. However is that such a bad thing if the purpose it to make you think about the sampler in a completely different way, possibly helping to inspire you to use it in a different way. I think not.

Using cues from musique concrete and Curtis Roads Microsound experiments the Morphagene is a “microsound and tape music module that’s designed to capture, re-generate and process sounds from both inside and outside your modular system”.

The module takes a stereo input and records sounds to “reels”. Each sound recorded onto the SD card is referred to as a reel, additionally reels can be split up into genes and the genes can be extremely short for granular microsound processing.

This can really be thought of as musique concrete for the 21st Century.

Next we take a look at the Stereo Triggered Sampler from 4ms.

We first saw rumblings of this module a good few years ago and it has gone through quite a few different revisions since then.

The module has various ways of addressing the stereo files on the SD card, firstly you can sum the left and right and then use each side of the module independently to address different files on the sd card. You can then flip it to L/R which allows you to play the left channel on one side and the right on the other. You can then flip it to Stereo link which will allow you to play the stereo file at the same time out of the left and right channel.

I think this module will give you can interesting way to address, record and mangle your stereo files without limitations on sample rate, bit depth and length.

The last sampler we want to take a look at is the Bitbox from 1010Music.

I guess in some ways this can be thought of as a much more classic sampler type. A 24bit sampler that allows you to record directly into the module or take samples from your computer on an SD Card reader.

Aaron Higgins was on hand to show off some of the new slicing abilities of the Bitbox. Perfect for slicing up breaks.

Bring on the badboy modular jungle I say!