Most hardware companies mark an anniversary with a sale. 1010music marks it with firmware. On October 10th, the brand’s 10-year anniversary and its annual #1010day, the company released a major free update for bento and Blackbox 2, and the feature list reads like a forum wishlist finally getting ticked off.
What the 1010day Firmware Adds
The headline item is sequencer automation. You can draw modulation for one or more instrument parameters, with scaling, straight into the sequence. For a sampler-groovebox, that is the difference between loops that sit still and patterns that move, and it is the feature owners have been asking about since the new platform arrived.
Then there is automated stem recording. Tracks can be saved as separate WAVs, so you can finish a jam on the box and carry the pieces into a DAW for mixing. Anyone who has bounced a stereo mix and regretted it later will understand why this matters.
Scenes arrive too: 16 of them, each a combination of sequences and Loop Groups across 8 tracks. That is enough to build a whole song or to perform one live, rather than juggling patterns by hand.
Sidechain compression gets a visual envelope control, and it can be triggered from an audio track, a pad, MIDI or Clock. The “Record from Anywhere” mode promises frictionless loop recording from the internal instruments and external sources alike, which 1010music pitches squarely at live looping. MIDI Remote Record/Clear/Play rounds things out for guitarists and anyone running these samplers from a footswitch or other controller.
bento owners get one exclusive: a new Shimmer Reverb for those ethereal washes. Blackbox 2 owners do not, so the two machines are not on completely equal footing this time.
Free Firmware as the Real Selling Point
The Blackbox 2 only arrived in May, and 1010music is already layering on features that plenty of competitors would hold back for a paid “Pro” tier or a hardware revision. That is a refreshing stance in a market where updates increasingly come with strings. It also fits a wider pattern of makers shipping big free firmware drops to keep existing owners happy.
The timing is telling. Over the past few weeks, r/1010music has been busy with unofficial firmware. Justin Joe’s free Blackbox Mod for the original Blackbox adds a sidechain ducker, chords, note conditions and SP-1200-style lo-fi modes, and a follow-up port brought custom reverbs to the Bluebox Euro. Users were clearly hungry for exactly this kind of depth, and sidechain now lands officially on the newer machines. The mods are unsupported and sit on top of stock 3.1.9, so an official route is the safer bet for anyone gigging with these boxes.
The press release stays vague on the details, though. How many parameters can a track automate at once? Does stem recording work in real time or as an offline render? How much CPU headroom is left once sidechain compression and 16 scenes are running on the smaller Blackbox 2? None of that is spelled out, so the answers will have to come from owners and early hands-on time with the 1010music bento and Blackbox 2 firmware.
Still, the direction is the right one. Automation, stems and scenes are the features that turn a clever sampler into the centre of a track-making workflow.
Pricing and Availability
The new firmware is free and available now in the Downloads area of the 1010music website.
