Critter and Guitari: Pocket Piano | Full Demo and Review

In 10 short years, Critter and Guitari's Pocket Piano has become a formidable weapon in many a studio. Engineering the Sound put it through its paces.

Born out of the Arduino DIY revolution, the Pocket Piano continues to provide creative inspiration and a world of swift, easy to access synthesiser sounds.

First retailed in 2010 by the Brooklyn, NYC-based company Critter and Guitari, the Pocket Piano is now out of production. Its sound-creating possibilities, however, remain as vital as ever.

In 2005, an Italian university crew in the beautiful Piedmont region developed the Arduino as an inexpensive, all-encompassing, and most importantly, general public licensed microcontroller, and the DIY synthesiser world was able to flourish again!

The Pocket Piano is a versatile synthesiser with a surprising amount of sounds and parameters, from raw tones to FM synthesis, to arpeggiators, all in a small but usable box. Depending on the setting chosen the polyphonic sections have four available voices and some units also have MIDI in, out, and thru. The available six (or sometimes seven) synthesis modes are:

Vibrato Synth
Harmonic Sweeper
Two-Octave Arpeggiator
Octave Cascade
Mono FM Synth
FM Arpeggiator

For extra portability, the units also have a built-in speaker and can be powered by a 9-volt battery if you wanna get creative on the go, or want to start experimenting without the constraint of plugging the box into an amplifier and finding a power transformer.

Perhaps the most alluring of all the Pocket Piano's qualities — and the one that attracted its star-studded clientele — is its immediacy. If you need a fresh and inspiring sound straight out of the box, this mighty little beast could be indispensable in the studio.

Recorded at Enmore Audio: https://happymag.tv/enmore-audio/
Produced by Happy Mag: https://happymag.tv/
Find out more: https://bit.ly/3zDv8un

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