I saw this around 9:00am this morning. My initial reaction was "this is dumb, why buy a Volca that does basically 1/6 of the one thing the Volca Beats does well?" By 9:30am I was already starting to come around on it ("wait, what if it's more of an analog synth with a sub-bass focus?"), and by 1:30pm I was checking to see if Sweetwater was taking pre-orders (they are).
Still the fact that I am likely to pre-order one of these doesn't mean I don't have some significant questions/concerns. At the moment, these include:
- How does pitch control work? Is it a just free turning pitch like on an 808 or the Volca Beats kick and toms? Or can you pitch it to semitones so it is more musically interesting, like a bass note? Are the 16 keys a chromatic keyboard, or are they just 16 buttons because that's the Volca form factor?
- MIDI Control - Will we have control of both pitch and velocity using a MIDI keyboard (and without a RetroKits special cable this time)?
- Can this thing really do "sub bass", or is mostly kick drum sounds? I'm no expert at this, but the Korg video had a lot of clicky percussive notes with varying decay settings. A "sub bass", in my mind, is more of a low-frequency notes without that "click" noise of a drum.
Positives: All black case looks absolutely amazing; digital display for BPM control; 16 sequences (instead of

and sequence chaining, sort of like a song mode.