Vortex Sound Research

I picked up a songmaker kit on the used market recently and have fiddled around enough to have some thoughts. I bought it because I wanted something portable and flexible for a solo trip. It wasn't cheap but wasn't horrifically priced either. Here are my thoughts - too long, didn't read - I'm guardedly happy with it:

• Updating the firmware is painful, and it's not obvious that it needs to be updated. The only way I found to do it was through the iOS app ... eventually
• The keyboard - two octaves C to B is annoyingly small, but could be worse.
• The lightpad block is a pretty neat drum pad / midi control surface.
• For my way of doing things - which is mostly about live recording and not too much about sequencing it provides a pretty good workflow.
• The three layer arpeggiator in the Roli Play VST is pretty powerful with some euclidian sequencer like features.
• I've found I can get some pretty rough but OK sounding stuff happening quickly - the gear doesn't get in the way at all once the firmware was updated.
• The small size of the keyboard does limit its usefulness (yeah I've mentioned this twice). It might be mitigated by getting a second seaboard, but it's already surprisingly heavy for such a compact device.
• I don't like how it's too closely attached to the computer - although it does work as a standard and MPE midi controller too.
• Preset management / adding your own sounds is not good in the roli software, and I have to assume the software is basically unmaintained at this point.

Here's an example of a rough cut using a 2 minute bari sax noodle I found on my hard drive while killing some time. I think that concert F minor is definitely my key.