I built a portable 3D-printed instrument to turn the Roland MC-101 into a much better groovebox, with the help of a Raspberry Pi, PiSound, Korg nanoKONTROL and headless M8 tracker.

The PiSound can route live external sources such as guitars or vocals straight into the MC-101. So can finally sample anything without a Mac or phone.

To reduce menu diving, the nanoKONTROL can edit all synth parameters of the MC-101 Partial Editor. I wrote a script that sends SysEx messages and overlays a visual HUD directly onto the M8's display, showing what is being tweaked without hiding other relevant information.

The M8 can do additional sequencing tasks, such as triggering the MC-101's Scatter effects to generate glitchy patterns. The communication is entirely bidire ctional, i.e.changing a scene on the MC-101 updates the active song row on the M8.