A new company, a premiere in New York and a sampler in a module.

1010music announced itself in the autumn of 2016. An archived copy of its website from early October that year shows little more than “Coming Soon!” and an invitation to its “world premier” at Machines in Music, a show in New York, on 8 and 9 October. Within weeks its about page described 1010 Music as “a new company providing innovative digital music solutions.” Before that the address was a parked domain listed for sale, so older pages archived under the same name have nothing to do with the instrument maker.

The company trades as 1010music LLC, and its warranty page asks customers who need a repair to ship products “to us in Los Angeles, CA, USA.” A company press release for the Bento in May 2025, carried by the news site Rekkerd, quoted Aaron Higgins as the “founder of 1010music.” Synthtopia had been interviewing him at trade shows for years — as the developer of the company’s Eurorack modules at Knobcon in 2017, the creator of its Laserbox firmware in 2018 and the designer of Blackbox in 2019. We found no co-founder named and no date of incorporation in the sources we checked, so we date the company by its public debut rather than by a founding year.

For several years the about page also listed the team’s earlier work: Native Instruments’ Traktor DJ app, which it said was Apple’s App of the Year in 2013; Looptastic, which it called a top-ten selling app of 2010; and MixMeister, “now part of inMusic.” That page has since been removed. We give the list as the company’s own claim; it does not say who worked on which product.

The first product was bitbox, a 26HP Eurorack sampler module with a colour touchscreen. Synthtopia reported it on 16 November 2016 as available at US$599.95: up to 16 samples played at once from a grid of on-screen pads, recordings locked to the modular’s clock, and presets that could be opened in Ableton Live. A touchscreen in a Eurorack module was unusual, and it became the company’s signature. fxbox, a performance effects module, and synthbox, a polyphonic synthesizer module, followed, along with toolbox, a sequencer that Synthtopia reported as available in November 2017.

From Eurorack modules to Blackbox, nanobox, Bluebox and Bento.

The module line widened before the company left the rack. In 2018 1010music released Euroshield, which brought the Teensy microcontroller platform to Eurorack, and Laserbox, firmware that let a modular synthesizer drive a laser. In 2019 it built and distributed the Waverazor Dual Oscillator module with the software company MOK, which Synthtopia described as a collaboration with a maker “known for their advanced touchscreen Eurorack module designs.” In 2020 the bitbox mk2, which added granular synthesis, and the smaller bitbox Micro took over from the original sampler.

The step out of the rack came with Blackbox, introduced at SynthPlex in March 2019 at US$599: a desktop sampler and sequencer run from a 3.5-inch touchscreen and four encoders. Reviewing it in September 2019, Sound On Sound measured it at 14 x 13 x 3cm — small enough, it joked, to carry ten in a backpack with room for sandwiches — and added, of the name, “Let’s just overlook the fact that it’s dark grey!” The Bluebox digital mixer, announced in October 2020, mixed 12 mono or six stereo inputs and could record them to a microSD card.

Colours then became product names. The nanobox series, launched in January 2022, began with lemondrop, a four-voice granular synthesizer, and fireball, an eight-voice wavetable synthesizer, each 3.75 x 3 x 1.5 inches with a 2-inch touchscreen; the razzmatazz groovebox and the tangerine sampler followed. Several launches have been timed for 10 October — “1010 day,” as Synthtopia put it when tangerine appeared in 2023.

The largest product so far is Bento, shown at Superbooth in Berlin in May 2025 at US$899, with a 7-inch touchscreen, 16 pressure-sensitive pads and eight encoders. MusicTech scored it 6 out of 10 in July 2025, praising its “high-quality hardware” but finding the firmware incomplete. Sound On Sound, in February 2026, called it “the company’s most ambitious product yet,” while complaining that the rear-panel labels were etched black on black. Blackbox 2, announced ahead of Superbooth 2026, went on sale in August 2026 at US$649.

The synthesizer makers beyond the giants.

Beyond the largest names in electronic instruments sits a tier of smaller synthesizer makers, some dating from the 1960s and others barely a decade old. Many have changed hands.

Oberheim, founded by Tom Oberheim in 1969, passed to Gibson after a 1988 bankruptcy; English Wikipedia says Gibson returned the trademark to its founder in 2019. Focusrite plc says it bought the Oberheim brand and trademarks from Tom Oberheim in 2022, and the brand, based in San Francisco, now works alongside Focusrite’s Sequential. Buchla began with Don Buchla in Berkeley in 1963; Australian investors bought it in 2012, and in 2018 its assets passed to Buchla U.S.A., which says many products are hand-built to order.

Waldorf, founded in 1988, went insolvent in 2004; Waldorf Music GmbH, set up in 2006, gives its address as Remagen, Germany. Access, maker of the Virus, calls itself a privately held German manufacturer; its website is published by Kemper GmbH of Recklinghausen, and German Wikipedia says no Virus has been produced since February 2024.

Modal Electronics, a British company incorporated in 2013, entered administration in 2023; after a 2024 restructuring involving Alltronics Holding, Modal calls itself a brand of a Hong Kong–registered company. Polyend, founded by Piotr Raczyński, is based in Olsztyn, Poland. 1010music, which debuted in 2016, gives Los Angeles as its home and lists China as the country of origin for its current hardware.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Based in Los Angeles, listed as made in China.

1010music does not say who manufactures its hardware, but its own shop answers part of the question. The product pages for Bento, the original Blackbox, both versions of Bluebox, bitbox mk2, bitbox Micro and the four nanobox instruments each give the “Country of Origin” as China. The new Blackbox 2 page and the pages for retired modules carry no such field. The user manuals we checked make no statement about where the products are made, and the company names no factory or contract manufacturer.

We found no record of a sale, a parent company or an outside investor in the sources we checked; the company still trades under its own name as 1010music LLC. Its home page leans on musicians — it quotes the drummer Danny Carey, the producer Stimming and the composer Michael Stearns, who says he has used the original bitbox “since it hit the market in 2016” — and on reviewers such as the YouTube channel loopop. These are the company’s own selections, which we have not checked against the originals.

No brand guide or colour standard is published. What the products show is consistent: short lower-case product names, compact dark-grey or black cases built around a touchscreen, and names and colours borrowed from fruit and sweets for the nanobox line. Stimming, in the quotation the company chose, calls them “beautiful industrial grey boxes.”

For a design guide, 1010music shows how a small company can build a recognisable family from one idea — a touchscreen in a small box — and a naming system of colours and flavours. Compare Elektron, whose grooveboxes Sound On Sound named among Bento’s competition, and Teenage Engineering, another maker of small, portable instruments. For this guide we use graphite, lemon yellow, tangerine and a clear blue with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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