After some initial reluctance, my impressions of the Mini have been very positive. I wasn’t planning on using its portability much, the reason I got the Mini was its stereo capability (more on that later). But being able to carry it anywhere is such an unexpected enjoyment. I’m making little tunes all the time now, and taking it with me anywhere - thanks Polyend for including the pouch! The button layout for holding it gameboy-style is very well thought out, and I like it that you can often navigate by both your left hand (d-pad) and right hand (plus/minus buttons). Even the stiff buttons compared to the OG are clearly intentional, because thumb-pressing while holding the device is way more comfortable.
I was expecting to miss the jog wheel, but came to realize that the Mini’s portability outweighs the comfort of the jog wheel. The d-pad works just fine, but I think the design could be improved by something like a scroll wheel on the side. But I’m not missing the jog wheel as much as I’d expected. Also the dedicated buttons on the OG can be easily mapped to the quick select of the Mini, so I don’t need to use the menu as much as I feared. And I love it that the key combinations, for instance pattern button + d-pad for switching between patterns, also work on the Mini, or holding and adjusting multiple parameters at the same time.
What I do surely miss the most, and have been working around ever since I got the Mini, is the lack of pads. Banging out some drums turned out to be easier than I expected. Although it’s nowhere near as fast and intuitive as it is on the OG, in some weird way it feels more precise, and I come up with different ideas. But I just can’t get anything melodic going by navigating the note grid, or by laying down a track full of C’s and then up/downing them into a melody. I also miss some way of just quickly triggering the currently selected instrument from the pattern view, like I do all the time with the pads, trying out a little melody or drum pattern. This can all be amended with an iPhone MIDI controller of course, but that’s adding another device and another cable, and I would like to stick to just the Mini as much as possible.
Another huge drawback of not having the pads, is that it ruins the joy of performance mode. While performing, I’m always triggering multiple effects at the same time. On the Mini, you’re stuck with navigating to the effect, adjusting the value, navigating to another, and so on. To me this crushes the whole intention of performance mode. If there only was some way to select multiple effects, for instance locking an effect with the fire button so that it stays selected when navigating to the next, this would hugely improve performance mode on the Mini. This way you could set up little scenes where the plus/minus buttons trigger a whole row of effects at once.
The reason I instabought it in the first place: stereo samples alone are totally worth buying the Mini for. The difference in spatial sound is just ginormous compared with the OG. Although you might not notice that much difference at first when playing with the Mini, especially because songs you load from from the OG (or the demo songs) will still have their mono samples. I built a little song with full stereo samples on the Mini and then loaded this unaltered onto the OG to truthfully compare the two. There’s a tape stop effect after which the song switches from the Mini to the OG or back. We all learned to work around the OG’s mono character, panning and reverb and the Space setting did get you quite far. But it’s just nothing compared to the full blazing stereo that the Mini has, it just sounds awesome. I just can’t stop being amazed at what huge sound this tiny little device can produce.
So yeah, the OG’s device design is overall more intuitive, but the Mini’s portability is one hell of an excuse for most of this, and almost everything that changed in the Mini supports its handheld use. I don’t have a permanent studio setup, so every time I’m making music I’m pulling devices from under the tables and chairs and hooking them up with cables and MIDI and whatnot. Being able to just pick up the Mini and continue where I left off, trying out a few new ideas, coming up with things that wouldn’t have happened in a studio, is just awesome. While a studio sometimes can feel like work, especially fighting MIDI and audio routing and goddamn this ground noise, the Mini feels like playtime.
