Donner is (I believe) a Chinese manufacturer of musical instruments with warehousing in the USA and Europe. The company has been in business for a decade. It’s built up a range of own-brand musical gear, including guitars, drums, strings, wind and keyboard instruments. The B1 looks like its first entry into the synthesizer market, and it’s pretty nifty. Faithful To The Original】The synthesis engine on Essential B1 is straightforward. With only 1 VCO, 1 VCF, And 1 VCA, You can't get the wrong sound. To get the organic sound texture, we keep the signal path fully analog.

Adjusting OCT, GATE LENGTH, and RATCHET for each step is now faster and more intuitive by holding the corresponding button and pressing the↑/ ↓ buttons. This unit is slightly easier to program than the original 303 but pretty similar. All the patterns are 16 steps or less. All notes are entered using the step sequencer. There's no live recording mode or anything like that.No tap write or realtime record, and no ability to record slides or accents in realtime, the TB-303 does not have some of these features but a lot of other clones do. That seems like a good place for a slide. Let's hear how that sounds. Just like that, we've added some more characters to our loop. If we like the changes that we made, we're just going to hit Save.

Where the B1 differs more dramatically from its inspiration is in the sequencing workflow. The original TB-303 used a small button-based sequencer with an awkward workflow that involved inputting pitch and timing – note triggers, rests, slides, accents and octave jumps – separately. This led many users of the original to rely on blind experimentation as much as careful composition when it came to programming patterns. That said, while the B1’s sequencing offers extra flexibility, the synth engine itself is still as bare bones as any other 303-alike, and without features like a full amp envelope, additional oscillator or variations in filter mode, the sonic range is effectively limited to a single – albeit very desirable – style. Behringer’s clone certainly looks the part more, is more faithful in its sequencer design, and matches the CV outputs of the original. The B1, however, is easier to program and its additional playability and sequencing tools mean that it can do more than simply replicate straightforward acid bass riffs. Its delay is a great addition too.Overall I’m really impressed. I’m building a live guitar/synth setup and the B1 is tiny yet does everything I want. Hopefully we’ll see some more synthy products heading our way so I can spend the money I saved on this!

There're several different dimensions you can actually change. For example, all of these right now will have a gate length of four. Gate Length is how long the note is. Let's say that we wanted the first note to be a bit longer. What we would do is we would hit Gate Length. 4 is the sort of middle value that means that the note is 50% of the length. 8 is the highest. Control Buttons: UP and DOWN, TRANSPOSE, PATTERN, TEMPO / TAP, PLAY / STOP, CLEAR, WRITE, BAR, SIGNATURE, DOTTEDLet's look at the next dimension. There's Ratchet here, which is kind of cool. It allows you to hit a note two or three times in rapid succession. Okay. Enough about the App. Let's try to use this thing as a MIDI device. The first thing I'm going to do is set up an external instrument device in Ableton Live. And I'm just going to come up with a random sequence to test things out. Okay. Let's hear this. One positive thing to note is that devs actually care about this product and have released several firmware updates not just to fix bugs but to add new features. The most recent update gave a song mode – something that I’ll probably never use but it’s reassuring to know that Donner care enough to keep updating this after the sale. Behringer has wasted no time in announcing faithful clones of the Sequential Prophet VS (appearing as the Pro VS Soul), the Oberheim OB (appearing in monophonic form as the UB-1 Spirit) , the Roland Jupiter-8 (appearing as the Saturn), Moog Minimoog (appearing as the Model D Soul), Roland JP-8000 (appearing as the JP-4000 Spirit), and the Korg Monotribe (appearing in a new synth 'inspired by' the original unit, the Hirotribe Soul). Finally, there's the big B's take on the EMS VCS3 which was one of the first portable synths. However, compared to Behringer's AKS Soul it’s a giant. Sometimes when pressing the keys when a pattern is playing it will transpose, other times it will clear a note, seems like a bug.