Analog Bass Synthesizer and Sequencer, Donner B1 Controller with 128 Patterns, Saturation & Delay Effects, LED Display and MIDI IN/OUT

Product Information

The 303 is a legendary tiny synth and sequencer that was released in 1981. It was originally marketed as a replacement for a real live bassist, the idea being that between the Roland 606 drum machine and the 303 bass synth, you could have an entire rhythm section that just consisted of two boxes. There's a tone knob. I'm going to turn it all the way to the left so we get it all bassy. So that's the most bassy it can go and then I'm going to go all the way to the right distortion is of course a very subjective thing I like this quite a lot. I think it adds to the grimness of the sound. Here, you can also find the Chinese brand Donner which has released many very affordable effect pedals in recent years. Already for less than 20€. I also took a closer look at some of them with synths ( Yellow Fall, Wave, Tutti Love, Vintaverb). Today came the news that Donner now also builds affordable synthesizers.I t’s not a hot SB news but a synth news worth reporting. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with Donner. Obviously, this is a very specific kind of synth . You have to want that 303 sound, but it sounds really good which meant that as I was making this video I really look forward to playing with it, which is always a good sign in terms of the sound. Here's how it works. The first thing you do is hit the Record/Edit button and that gets you into Record/Edit mode. Then if you've got a pattern loaded in memory, it'll show up here. Like it does here.

Oh, and it's got a delay. Acid lines sound great with that effect, and Donner seems to have thought ahead there. Sound-wise, the delay isn't as aggressive as you might think, but if you're out doing a DAWless gig, it's excellent to have that right there and ready to go. Again, Donner seems to have done their homework on what the TB-303 needed to have. For the price it is great! Construction feels solid enough, and it sounds very nice. There are a few small issues which stopped me giving 5 stars which are related to it being a TB-303 clone, which I will go into below, but I will preface this by saying that it delivers its own nice take on the acid sound. 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. Okay. So thus far we've only talked about the internal sequencer. But this actually has MIDI ports. It's got a MIDI input MIDI out port and a USB port. When it's plugged in via USB, it's a class-compliant MIDI device. It's worth noting that it does not run on MIDI USB power. It just uses that MIDI port for MIDI stuff.So as we've already said the B1 is an analog mono synth and it takes its inspiration from the classic TB303. If you don't know what the 303 is, here is a one-minute history. Sometimes when pressing the keys when a pattern is playing it will transpose, other times it will clear a note, seems like a bug. The slide implementation is not by default set to legato playing, it can be set by holding the lower F# on keyboard whilst turning on power though, but it should really be automatically on, it does remember the setting though, so after setting it isn’t an issue. 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! Once I've got my pattern playing, I can switch patterns and it will wait till the end of the pattern before switching. So it's not like it's going to suddenly switch you to another pattern. In this way, you can kind of build up songs. And your set would consist of switching between different patterns.

Let'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. It also a built-in distortion/saturation to add spice to your sounds and a tape delay effect. Each effect can be turn on and off individually with a switch. The effects circuits are probably from their pedal series. The B1 allows you to dial in classic deep bass tones such as, distortion and tape delay. It will give you the taste of being one of the famous EDMs, Hip-Hop DJs or producers. Depending on where you live, the time it may take for your exchanged product to reach you, may vary.On 11 March 2021, China’s National People’s Congress approved the controversial electoral laws for Hong Kong, which aims to ensure a system of “patriots governing Hong Kong”. The reforms expanded the number of seats in the Legco and Chief Executive Election Committee, but reduces the number of directly democratically-elected seats. Hong Kong Government officials and pro-establishment figures have hailed the reforms as a way to shut out “anti-China” forces from the political structure whereas the pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong criticised the reforms as a “major regression” in democracy.

There are probably a few other things I’m forgetting, but I’ll finish by saying I have a lot of 303 synths, including TB-303’s, TT-303’s, TB-03, x0xb0x, T8, and the Donner B1 is still useful to me, it brings its own flavour of acid, in particular the filter decay goes nice and short for very choppy acid lines, the resonance also sounds very nice. I think with a few more firmware tweaks it will be even better, for reference I am on the late version as of August 2023 which I think is 1.03. 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.

Discussions

Okay, enough about the 303. Let's actually hear the synth We've got in front of us. First, let's hear the sawtooth wave. Now, the square wave. Sounds really nice. You can really tell it's analog. Of course, we won't really know anything until we've got a pattern going. Los Angeles, August 15, 2023] – Chinese musical instrument manufacturer Donner today announced the release of the latest firmware update, V1.1.0, for the Essential B1 Bass Synthesizer, their first analog bassline synthesizer with sequencer. This major update brings a host of exciting new features, enhancements, and bug fixes, making the Essential B1 even more versatile and user-friendly.

We’ve optimized the sequencer of this synthesizer to be easier and more intuitive to use. Easily edit your own sequences with 128 sequence presets covering a range of musical styles, and 128 user programmable presets. 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.There’s also an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) mode with a realtime spectrum analyser, along with a dual waveform generator. Each of the two oscillators can create sine, square, triangle, sawtooth, pulse and noise waveforms. I can also hit export and it will export my sequence out. It doesn't save it as a MIDI file. It saves it as a little proprietary format but that proprietary format is actually a text file in JSON format that is very easy to edit by hand.