201 Pocket Piano from Critter and Guitari is a two-in-one bundle of polar opposites. On the one hand, it’s a small synth with a minimal set of controls and no screen. Yet, under the hood, it’s infinitely customizable and tweakable using anything from simple text files to pure data patches and open source code.

It comes with a built-in sequencer, six synth engines and five arpeggiator patterns, but each of the synth engines and arp patterns can be either customized or totally swapped out with engines or patterns you can download from a growing list of options available online, or ones you tweak or create on your own using free open source tools.

In this video, I take an in-depth look at 201 Pocket Piano, its pros and cons, including how it compares to its bigger brother, the organelle

0:00 Intro

1:25 Overview

3:40 Factory synths

5:50 Factory arps

7:10 Sequencer

8:00 Custom LFO?

8:30 Polyphony

8:55 Build & IO

10:25 vs Organelle

11:20 Patch swap

14:10 More macros?

14:30 Multisamples

14:55 More arps

15:15 Text arps

15:30 Pure data

16:10 Mother-in-law

17:45 Custom 201?

18:00 MIDI settings

18:15 Pros & cons

20:05 Outro walkthru