Even if you’re not acquainted with the latest and greatest in electronic music production gear, you’ve probably heard of the Stockholm-based Teenage Engineering, a Swedish consumer electronics company founded in 2005 by Jesper Kouthoofd, David Eriksson, Jens Rudberg, and David Möllerstedt credited for reinvigorating the synth industry with an aesthetic approach expanding well beyond one note. The design-forward imprint of Teenage Engineering has gone onto influence much larger and established brands within the category, most recently with the release of the Yamaha SEQTRAK Mobile Music Ideastation, an all-in-one system capable of turning music into an augmented reality experience.
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It’s near impossible not to acknowledge Yamaha’s SEQTRAK, which exhibits a notably “inspired” resemblance to Teenage Engineering’s OP-1, a similarity magnified by Yamaha’s decision to adopt a light gray and orange colorway that’s already associated with the Swedish brand’s Field System devices. That out of the way, Yamaha has designed a well thought out portable music creation station, with the two-tone design serving to visually demarcate a 3-part user interface separating drums, synth/sampler, and sound design and effects controls along its length. Visually the color-coded separation of controls is more clear in its light gray and orange iteration versus the charcoal on black version, resembling one elongated stretch of LEGO bricks that lend the design its charm.
If you’re not acquainted with portable music composition sound machines, consider the SEQTRAK the combination of a synthesizers, drum machine, sampler, and sequencer in an all-in-one portable, battery-powered package – a keyboard of sorts tasked to create, edit, and sequence music.
About the size of a wide but shallow keyboard, the SEQTRAK is designed to operate as a stand alone device or connected to a computer at up to 4 hours fully charged (the sound machine connects via wireless connection or using a physical MIDI+USB cable), with its backpack-friendly portability emphasized by the product’s “unleash your creativity anywhere” tagline.
An accompanying app extends the capabilities of the SEQTRAK with an intuitive graphic user interface allowing to sequence tracks and manipulate sounds with a set of functions, including envelopes, filters, and effect manipulation.
Equipped with dual sound engines, the Advanced Wave Memory 2 has an 128-note polyphony (the distinct notes a synthesizer can play at one time) capable of reproducing a spectrum of pianos, strings, and guitars, alongside a four-operator FM engine tasked to handle synth pads, leads, and FM electric pianos.
The SEQTRAK app also offers musicians a Visualizer mode engineered to produce visuals perfectly synced to the music. These patterns can be customized with motion effects and also be viewed in an Augmented Reality (AR) mode that conjures a collection of 3D virtual objects over real-world footage.
The Yamaha SEQTRAK Mobile Music ideastation launched in Orange or Black with an MSRP of $599, but is currently available online at various music and consumer electronics retailers for $399.
Source: design-milk