It's a new year, and here we have a new instrument from a newly-established music tech brand: Floating Knobs' Cuisine.
Founded by Dorian Largen and Ioana Vreme Moser, Floating Knobs is a Berlin-based manufacturer and design studio focused on "bringing playful but complex instruments to musicians, experimentally inclined nerds and instrument lovers".
Floating Knobs' debut instrument is Cuisine, a 12-track sequencer that's designed for generating complex rhythms, melodies and modulation signals. Cuisine's tracks can each hold 8 patterns of 64 steps, and each track can be set to output any combination of MIDI, CV or Gate. The instrument can store up to 16 projects, each of which stores 12 tracks.
Each of Cuisine's tracks is equipped with a step sequencer which offers both traditional and Euclidean sequencing. Tracks can be clocked together or independently, meaning that you're able to design complex polyrhythms across multiple tracks. Melodies can be dialled in using user-customizable scales that can be applied to individual tracks, while a transposition control makes programming chord progressions quick and simple.
Cuisine's interface is designed to provide ergonomic control with just one hand, so it'll fit nicely into a live performance set-up - we particularly like the look of the 4x4 grid of old-school keyboard buttons, which can also function as a playable keyboard for entering melodies.
The instrument can be used standalone or integrated into a Eurorack modular set-up, and it's equipped with a respectable amount of I/O, including 4 CV outputs, 8 gate/trigger outputs, 4 gate inputs, MIDI TRS in/out and a USB-C port for power and firmware updates. All of Cuisine's ins and outs are freely assignable to one or more tracks.
Floating Knobs tell us that they are cooking up two Eurorack modules scheduled for release in 2024: Settlement, a quad wavetable oscillator, and Lovemake, a quad complex LFO.
Cuisine is priced at €450 and the first units will ship in mid-January.
Find out more about Cuisine on Floating Knobs' website.
