TipTop Audio – One

EDIT – Pricing has been announced at $175 and there’s now a video embedded below.

TipTop Audio have teased us for a while now about One, people seemed to start guessing it was a sample player as that fleshes out the TipTop system nicely and also offers a range of potential drum sounds their 808 and 909 analogue clones can’t offer. Well the predictions were right as One is a sample player. It’s only 4HP, high quality (up to 96kHz sample rate, great for pitching things down and retaining quality) with basic controls and CV / gate inputs. The module takes micro SD cards and there’s 6 SD cards with content designed by GLITCHMACHINES which we’ll get into below. The blurb from the website is copied below that too.

Getting into the cards we start with ‘VCTRS: Lets Get Started’. This is a mixed material one shot library with 60 sounds across 5 banks. This introduces the most compelling material from each card to demonstrate the strength of the module. KERNL is another one shot set of sounds which are percussive and textural in natural that’s labelled ‘Binary Manipulated Percussive Impacts’. BENT is (you’ve guessed it…) Circuit Bent sounds again percussive and this time digital. It’s made up of 256 sounds harvested from a variety of customised circuit bent machines. HYBRID again is percussion with 256 foley and field recording sounds. SBSTRT is called ‘Natural Percussive Elements’ agains both percussive and textural with 256 raw, natural earth sounds made by manipulating materials such as metal, stone, ice, plastic, vegetables etc. Finally PERC is again percussive but this time they are multi layered drum hits and percussive hits with tight attacked and bright harmonic content coming from a variety of sources.

It all sounds very good to me and the GLITCHMACHINES sounds I’m sure will deliver the goods!

ONE brings organic sound and super low latency sample playback to the modular. It differs from other sample players in that it handles the digital audio bits as a continuously manipulated electrical flow, a feature inspired by our analog knowhow. This unique core makes ONE truly integral within the Tiptop percussive modular ecosystem thanks to a lightweight and responsive digital circuit with a very analog feel.

ONE brings a world of colors to the modular right out of the package. We have invited some of the best sound designers in the Industry to create professional sound libraries with content tailored to the unique sonic framework of the modular synthesizer and that fully takes advantage of ONE’s unique qualities. To start with, ONE comes with a SD card loaded with a free set of 60 sounds designed by Glitchmachines. More cards are available to purchase separately each containing carefully selected material with up to 256 sound files. Using your own sample libraries or recordings is easy too, just copy 16 or 24bit mono WAV files onto the SD card, pop the card into ONE and go.

ONE offers several modes of operation, with the primary being the super low latency Trigger mode that retrieves audio data off the SD card adding no artificial processing such as click removal, crossfading, eq or gain normalization. In this mode, it’s a highly transparent player up to 24 bit 96kHz with no interpolation of the audio data: what you put in is what you get out. With a delay as low as 0.25ms from the moment the trigger hits, ONE offers harmonically dense, clear and detailed audio with a great rhythmic feel.

ONE handles external CV through a user selectable multifunction jack. Pitch is the main control with two modes available: Free pitch allows for fine tuning of the playback rate, great for adding subtle vibrato or wild tape speed effects; Quantized pitch maps CV to the standard 12 tone system over 3.5 octaves and is ideal for melodic content. CV can also be used to sequence through files off the SD card allowing far more varied sounds from a single source; almost like an entire percussion section behind the slim panel.

Although originally designed to play tightly with our analog drums and envelopes, ONE’s rich sound quality encouraged us to make it work in a variety of other applications that are less demanding of sub millisecond timing response. The extra headroom at the core level allows features such as Gated playback, Looping, and Triggering with fades in and out to accommodate different types of sound sources from drum loops to polysynth chords to noise sources and other yet unimagined uses.

ONE offers another useful dimension since it can play CV signals too. Drop in a card with LFO signals, random CV, slopes and envelopes for a whole set of new control and modulation possibilities.

ONE is as simple to use as it is affordable and plays extremely well with it’s analog cousins – our vision for bringing samples into the modular world.