It's Alive
For ARPIE - MIDI Arpeggiator [FULLY CONSTRUCTED]
I bought one of these so that I could make Italo-Disco without having to enter the notes manually, and also because my Arp Odyssey doesn't have an arpeggiator. I am a satisfied customer. It's a terrific little arpeggiator with a couple of quirks. On the positive side it's tiny, battery-powered, surprisingly well-put-together for a home-made unit. I use it synced up via MIDI to Logic. It syncs reliably; it syncs immediately; it remains synced; it doesn't stutter or fall out of time, all of which sounds trivial but I have used professional equipment that doesn't even do that. Layering multiple bouncing arpeggios on top of each other is a breeze.
The front panel has a bewildering array of controls but in practice PATN, SPAN, GATE, MODE, and RATE are self-explanatory and enough to get by, plus INST for extra spiciness. I bought my unit in November 2018. It is apparently a V5 unit. It comes with a cheat sheet, which is useful because the online manual is slightly out of date. I admit that I've only used it as a synced arpeggiator playing individual lines of notes rather than a live performance tool. It will also transmit accent information, and can transmit a separate accent channel. The only interface is MIDI, there's no CV/GATE or USB, but on the positive side the use of MIDI raises the interesting possibility of running arpeggios through cheap old digital synths. It has a separate MIDI sync input, potentially useful if you're playing live with everybody synced up to a master MIDI clock.
Also the lights look wonderful. Mine is the thin white Duke model, black letters and bright white LEDs like a Station to Station-era David Bowie stage set. The interior has some blue LEDs that flash when they feel like it.
Quirks? The random pattern function doesn't work as I expected, although it's described correctly in the manual; instead of randomly bouncing from note to note it generates a random sequence when you initially play the chord and the cycles through it repeatedly, so it doesn't sound random. There's a way of bypassing the arpeggiator entirely if you want to solo but it takes a bit of digging in the manual to find out how, and it makes the HOLD LED go crazy. HOLD will hold a sequence, and you can use an external keyboard to transpose it up and down - but for some reason the unit also transmits the incoming keyboard notes to the output, which sounds odd. When HOLD is turned on it would make more sense to route incoming notes purely to the arpeggiator engine.
It might just be the batteries I'm using, but the battery holder is very tight, to the extent I have to use a screwdriver to lever the battery out. The MIDI ports are a bit stiff too, which also worries me, but I imagine they'll loosen up over time. This is assuming you ever want to unplug the unit. You might leave it on all the time.
At £120 it seems expensive but there's nothing quite like it; some synthesisers output arpeggios but are much more expensive, some software plug-ins will arpeggiate but aren't as immediate, other hardware arpeggiators aren't as functional, step sequencers are more complex and the leading value-orientated step sequencers seem to have trouble syncing reliably. I imagine MIDI-CV interface and USB power would just add to the cost. Four stars because nothing is perfect, plus one star because it feels bad to give it four stars.