Superbooth 2025: 1010music Bento is a new portable, battery-powered creative multi-track sampler with granular and more.
The US-based company 1010music is probably best known for portable synthesizers, samplers, and recording tools. The Blackbox is a good seller in its portfolio, a small multi-part sampler and groovebox with granular synthesis.
At Superbooth 2025, the Blackbox will be getting a flagship brother. 1010music has released Bento, a new creative sampler.
1010music Bento
Bento is a new flagship sampler but in a portable, battery-powered format. 1010music Bento builds on the popular Blackbox sampler, but is supercharged with new features and connection options.
“Bento is everything our users have been asking for in a flagship sampler—more power, more control, and more performance tools, all in a portable package,” said Aaron Higgins, founder of 1010music. “It’s designed to replace your laptop and become the brain of your setup.”
Immediately noticeable: the format has changed. It’s significantly larger than the Blackbox, has a 7” diagonal color touchscreen, 16 velocity and pressure-sensitive pads, plus eight endless encoders for hands-on control of the parameters.
Bento features eight tracks that can be freely assigned to different sound source duties: sampled instruments, slicer, loops, granular, or external MIDI.
Sampling, Resampling & Granular
Talking about sampling. It’s a full-featured sampler that can internally sample and playback at pristine 24-bit quality.
It covers all the sampler bases, from chromatic playback to multi-sampled instruments playable from a keyboard, one-shots and loops creation, and pad-based drum racks. Also onboard is a beat slicer for loop edition and a granular synth engine taken from the popular Lemondrop synth.
1010music also added an internal 24-bit resampling function. Sample management with streaming handles a microSD card. It ships with over 5 GB of samples and 165 patches of fresh new sounds.
It includes deeply multi-sampled instruments from pianos to classic synths by Samples from Mars, Soundtrack Loops, and Drew Neumann.
Then, you can refine your samples with built-in filters and a per-track FX engine with delay, reverb, chorus, flanger, and phaser with automation capabilities.
Sequencer
Like its little brother, Blackbox, the 1010music Bento also has a scene-based sequencer with real-time and step recording, piano roll, and various probability tools. This allows you to use the Bento Sampler as a groovebox, as you can play complete drum racks on one track.
Each track has four sequencers, giving you a total of four that let you create complete arrangements or clips on the fly.
On the modulation side, it houses LFOs, envelopes, and additional step sequencers that can be assigned to the engine’s parameters.
Connectivity
The connection side is particularly extensive and shows the flagship character compared to the Blackbox. It has three stereo inputs, three stereo outputs, a headphone out, a USB-C host port for connecting MIDI devices, a USB-C device, and dual MIDI input/output sockets on TRS jacks.
According to 1010music, you can also use it as a mixer with effects on the go. It’s built-in rechargeable battery provides up to three hours of portable creativity. Alternatively, you can power it with a USB-C cable.
First Impression
Creative samplers with flagship feature sets are rare in 2025. The new Bento sampler looks like a device that offers everything people want. It would have been a nice bonus if Bento had also included the drum and wavetable synthesis from the other devices. Nevertheless, another surprise for Superbooth 25 that looks very tasty.
1010music Bento is available now at the official website and through authorized dealers worldwide for $899 USD/1049€.
More information here: 1010music
Available at my partner
Aha ! Interesting…
I grew up with the big and fat synths, Roland Jupiter 8 & 6, Yamaha CS, Korg MS, vocoders…
My god, how lucky you are now !
Technology brings us so many synths, so many ways to play music. Now a Korg M1 fits in your phone !
Enjoy every little things guys, that’s life.
I’m just like a kid in front of a X-Mas tree.
Yes and also there are so many similar and unoriginal things doing nothing different and this is another example. If you want to spend this amount of money, just get a Digitakt. If you ant spend half the amount, get a Tracks (don”t get a Move). If you want to play with effects and glitchy stuff, get an SP404 + a P6 plus a dinner for your lady.
Don’t want to rain on anyones parade, but Bluebox’s stuff always comes out as beta and some things often stay this way. Just make some music, sell it or perform it and buy yourselves some space to put proper sized gear in it, guys. This minituarization of gear is getting out of hand.
Do not get a digitakt if you are looking for a groovebox. It has no polyphony, it’s not portable. I’ve owned the Syntakt, the Digitone, the Digitone II, they are great for what they are, but they aren’t the same as what this does.
And the Ableton Move is great. Limited, don’t get it if you want sound design, but for a sketch device, it’s great.
I do not want a large studio space anymore. I want to sit on my couch and make music. I want to sit at my desk at work and make music. I want to make music in bed. This is why I love my M8 tracker, why I love my MPC One+ (which I modded with an internal battery), why I love my Torso T-1 paired with my phone or my iPad. Boomers need not apply.
Very wrong! This box has everything Elektron missed to put into Digitakt II. The author of this article rightly highlights exactly all the features that Digitakt II is missing painfully. Only the number of tracks might be a problem, but there seems to be an error in the text:
„ Each track has four sequencers, giving you a total of four that let you create complete arrangements or clips on the fly. “
This does not make sense, I guess it should be eight x four, but I didn’t check the manual yet.
If the software is stable then this is a Digitakt killer!
I hope they add a way to convert projects to DAWPROJECT format. The Elektron way with overbridge while no question an incredible engineering feature is actually not really what you want with a sampler, instead of manually recording tracks and still having to fight with latency and other particularities (FX?) we just want to transfer a project to another DAW, best with an open project format. Akai did that right, save your project as Ableton file and go on with working on it inside the computer, but they should support DAWPROJECT of course.
However, if this little flagship works flawlessly it is best of Elektron and Akai in a portable way, just great, thanks 1010music!
Looks super cool. Sounds like it needs a few firmware updates before its ready for primetime, but I will check back in on this in a few months.
this sounds like everything I wanted the black box to be, which I ended up selling. Definitely interested but I’ll wait for reviews. I have a deluge already so that’s pretty much covering all bases minus the velocity sensitive pads, and more visual screen
Looks really nice, we have come a long way since the Yamaha qy70, definitely interested in this?, well done to 1010music to keeping the product creativety moving