Innovation of the Year

Teenage Engineering PO-32 tonic £85

Web teenage.engineering Format Mac/PC Swedish electronic instrument designers Teenage Engineering have made a name for themselves in hipster music circles with their ingenious OP-1 portable synthesiser and the eye-catchingly skeletal Pocket Operator range of budget-priced synths and drum machines. PO-32 tonic, however, marks a departure for them – and the industry as a whole – being a hardware emulation of Sonic Charge’s evergreen software drum machine, Microtonic (9/10, 163). In fact, PO-32 was designed by Magnus Lidström, the brains behind said virtual beatbox.

PO-32 features 16 drum, cymbal and percussion sounds, which can be triggered live or sequenced via real-time recording or manual step entry. It’s four-voice polyphonic, with only one sound from each column of the 16-button grid able to play at once, but with kicks in the first column, snares in the second, hats and rides in the third and percussion in the fourth, this is easily managed. Output is strictly mono, and while there are only two sound editing controls onboard, they’re both pretty effective: Morph is awesome, letting you set each kit piece at any point in between two sounds, and Pitch does what the name suggests. Handily, Morph and Pitch can be automated, and 16 (uneditable) performance FX are built in, too, for dramatic triggered filtering, delays, stutters and more.

Microtonic and PO-32 share the exact same engine, so you’d expect the two to sound identical, and proving that they do is easy, as PO-32’s party trick is its ability to import presets from Microtonic… via its integrated microphone! Hold the unit near your speakers and hit the Transfer button in Microtonic to have the current patch blasted across in a nostalgia-inducing burst of modem noise. It never gets old!