Blast Beats : Glitchy digital heaven with an analog edge.

I ordered this expecting an unconventional and novel groovebox and was not disappointed in the slightest. The sound of the Yamaha YMF-262 is incredible! I have owned a secondhand Yamaha PSS-480 FM keyboard in the past and absolutely cherished it, and this is like having four of them (8, considering the design of the synth operators), a powerful sequencer, fully programmable drums, and extensive io for the studio.

It’s not a typical groovebox with homogeneous sounds that you could get elsewhere. The BlastBeats is wholly its own beast with a sonic character that runs from dungeon synth video game exploitation to soulful IDM with ease.

Sitting down with BlastBeats in your lap and tapping out grooves with the chunky, LED lit switches is loads of fun. Programming kits with the sea of sliders available is incredibly rewarding and after getting past some limitations and figuring out the signal flow some great tones can be coaxed out of the vintage sound chip.

I highly recommend it if you are looking for an experimental sketchpad that doesn’t really sound like anything else, but can easily find its niche in a myriad genres of electronic music.

Pros:

-Four (assignable and automatable) 1/4” outputs for studio mixing.

-Tight midi integration with an analog clock io

-Every sound parameter accessible via slider.

-Neat sequencer tricks with plenty of ways to shuffle up the beat.

-Novel tone with a vintage digital feel.

-Solid metal casing and pleasantly tactile sliders/ buttons.

Cons:

-Sequencer, and load/save learning curve isn’t immediate and the manual will need to be repeatedly consulted.

-My unit came with buggy sliders, I fixed them with deoxit and by opening up the unit and wiggling some of the slider casings so they weren’t touching each other on the PCB, I emailed Twisted Electrons about this issue, but haven’t heard back.