1010music’s blackbox 2 — the sequel to its beloved palm-sized sampling workstation — is shipping this month at $649. The original blackbox earned a cult following by cramming a complete sample-based studio into something that fits in a jacket pocket: load sounds, chop them, sequence them, add effects, and perform, all on one small touchscreen. The blackbox 2 keeps that compact philosophy but roughly doubles the processing power, adds a larger high-resolution 4-inch color touchscreen, reworks the interface, and — the single most-requested change — can now run on batteries, making it genuinely portable for sampling and sketching away from a desk.
Watch: 1010music blackbox 2 — Back in Black (YouTube)
What the tracks can hold
The blackbox 2 gives you four tracks, each able to host a different kind of instrument: Loop, One-Shot, Slicer, Shredder, or Multisample. That range is what makes it a whole studio rather than a one-trick sampler — one track can loop a drum break, another can slice a vocal, another can play a multisampled piano across a keyboard. You can record sequences in real time by finger-drumming one-shots on the touchscreen or playing notes on a virtual keyboard, then layer effects on top. It’s a full compose-and-perform loop in a device you can hold in one hand.
The battery change matters more than it sounds
Portability was always the blackbox’s promise, undercut by the fact that the original still needed to be plugged in. Battery power closes that gap and changes what the device is for: it becomes something you can sample with on a train, in a field, or on a couch, capturing sounds and building sketches wherever you are and refining them later. The bigger touchscreen and updated encoders-above-the-screen layout make that untethered workflow less fiddly than the cramped original — a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade for a device whose entire appeal is immediacy.
Where it fits
The compact-sampler category has gotten crowded — grooveboxes and pocket studios are everywhere now — but the blackbox built its reputation on a specific balance of depth and simplicity, and the 2 doubles down on it rather than chasing feature bloat. For beatmakers, sound designers, and anyone who likes to build tracks from their own recorded material, a more powerful, battery-capable blackbox with a proper touchscreen is exactly the iteration the original was asking for. At $649 it’s not impulse-buy territory, but for the “whole studio in your bag” use case it remains close to unique.