Meeblip Anode Sale

meeblip-anode

CDM’s Peter Kirn let us know about a three-day sale on the MeeBlip anode synthesizer, to celebrate its one year birthday.

For 72 hours only – Thursday through Saturday, March 12-14 – you can get anode direct for only US $99.95 (normally $139.95).

It’s the lowest price we’ve ever offered, and we’ll revert to normal pricing once it’s over.

anode offers:

  • Dual digital oscillators, now with a wavetable mode you can unlock with 16 more wave shapes
  • A unique and aggressive analog filter
  • Hands-on control in a rugged but compact 4″x4″ enclosure

Here’s a video demo of the Meebip anode in action:

The video was shot at the studio of Robert Lippok, a Berlin-born music producer and artist known for his releases on raster noton. The video demonstrates the range of sound possibilities with the MeeBlip anode.

The sale ends midnight March 14th, 2015. See the Meeblip site for more info.

30 thoughts on “Meeblip Anode Sale”

  1. I remember lusting after synths I couldn’t afford in the 1980s. Now here we are 30 years later and you can pick up wickedly fun synths for $100.

  4. I got the Meeblip se when they released it, it’s a pretty good little synth, very affordable! These guys are going places.

          1. He said screwed INTO the top panel, not ONTO. He’s saying that they’re surface-mounted on the board rather then put through the holes in the case, tightened with hex nuts on the outside of the case, and then hardwired to the circuit board.

  5. Ironically, you could easily get much the same sounds out of the laptop without needing the Meeblip. Mind you, you’d miss out on the, ah, unmistakable analoguey goodness. I’d rather have a Monotron.

  7. I guess at that price point it’s an impulse buy for a lot of people. As much as I want to like this box, none of the demo sounds have ever seemed that useful. Grungy, sure, but they all seem to have a lot of undesirable noise that would keep them from standing out in a mix – contrary to most chippy 8-bit sounds that cut right through. The filter sounds reasonably nice, maybe it would benefit from an audio input mod. It’s also a hard sell here in the UK where even at the sale price there is very little difference between this and the Waldorf Rocket. I do, however, have a lot of respect for lowering the entry point to hardware over software, and for making more kit open source.

    1. In a way, I wish we’d named the MeeBlip line differently, because there has been a lot of focus on the 8-bit oscillators in the original MeeBlip line and that seems to lead inevitably to a discussion of chip music. 

      Instrument design is always about trade-offs, and when Peter and I were designing anode we found ourselves naturally gravitating toward certain sounds and colors that sounded best on the hardware. That’s why we initially went with the variable pulse oscillators on V1 of anode and then added a selection of 16-bit single cycle wavetables in V2 that aliased, had overtones and were generally not the most pristine in the world — they fit the personality of the instrument and its 1970s-style filter. And at the end of the day, it’s all about personality. 

      When you’re building and marketing a North American-made synth for $140, you have to be extremely careful with hardware costs. Adding a second envelope for the filter, DCOs or maybe a sub-oscillator is something we’d have loved to do, but the trouble is that if you double the size of the case and add in a few features you find yourself looking at a retail price of $200+.

      1. Thanks, James! I’m much aware of being in the minority on this – the anode has had much well-deserved success and needs no defense. It’s a smart feature set for a first synth, I just find, from the demos and recordings on the ‘net, that the oscillators seem noisy in a way that wouldn’t be very musically useful for me.

        I’m also finding it difficult to find any examples of people developing their own firmware additions or hardware mods – maybe you can point some out? It would be cool to hear some examples of someone else coming up with a way of changing how the digital oscillators sound.

        1. Axel Werner extended the original MeeBlip with ideas like ring mod and an arpeggiator, and that code could be easily modified to run on anode. As far as the oscillators go, the only mod I’m aware of is our own V2 wavetable mod. It started as simple 8-bit single cycle tables, but the noise floor was too high and we shifted it to 256 sample long 16-bit waves. I’ve toyed with phase distortion as well, but wasn’t overly impressed by my experiments.

          I think the demo track Andrius Mamontovas created with the V1 firmware (it’s on the meeblip front page) is probably the definitive demo of the synth.

          Anode has a distinctive sound that isn’t to everyone’s taste, and that’s cool.

          1. Huh. I can’t seem to find that Axel Werner firmware – there seem to be a lot of pages on the meeblip site that don’t exist anymore.

            Do you think having the source code in assembly is a significant barrier to people wanting to tinker? Are there any plans for a different bootloader in the pipeline?

            1. yes, it does seem like a lot of pages are down on the site, would love to be pointe to a community of people messing with this as I just bought one! 🙂

  8. Damn. And I was doing so well. At $100 it’s a no brained for me. The open source code base put me over the edge. I’d love to get into synth programming and this could be a good place to start.

  9. I wish this had been developed using something easier to program. Is there a remote possibility of using something we can program with C? Other people in modular world are doing this. 🙂

    1. anode is open source hardware, but we designed it first and foremost as a ready-to-play musical instrument, not a hacking platform. It’s relatively straightforward to swap out wavetables and make changes to the core functionality, but some of the oscillator and filter routines are going to be convoluted in any programming language.

      The sad truth is that there aren’t many people with the inclination to hack tiny digital synths, even when their firmware is written in C (there are very few firmware mods for the Shruthi, for example). That makes for a pretty small market.

      That said, we continue to work on a new MeeBlip DIY board. It’s a small and affordable hacker-friendly board that is designed to be easy to build an affordable synth around. It has been through 3 or 4 iterations, but we’re getting to the point where it’s beginning to feel like the right set of features.

    1. We won’t know until the sale ends on Saturday. We’ll contact everyone who ordered a backordered synth and let them know what the wait time looks like early next week (and they can cancel if they wish).

      We sold our entire inventory in about a day and decided to honor the price on the next production run rather than ending the sale early without warning.

      1. Sounds great.

        I was a bit slow checking your sale out and don’t mind a wait.

        It’s really surprising how much cool gear I want, which sort of slips from my mind without some psot or other reminding me to jump on it.

  11. yup, I was a sucker for this as well. great demo above. I use my minitaur and a combination of VA’s for synth bass duties, but when I saw the pwm in action, and how it would compliment the minitaur, I had to buy it. now I just have to wait a month and a half to get it! my own fault…. but can’t wait….

  12. these meeblip guys just ripped me off!!! first they took my payment with no problem… us$118 — then they sent me an email —-
    Hi bret,

    When we announced our 72-hour MeeBlip sale, we thought we’d sell a few dozen synths and get to see how our new site operates in the real world. We certainly didn’t expect to sell out our entire inventory in less than 24 hours. That’s what happened, though, and we just wanted to pass along our thanks.

    We started shipping orders today and will continue to ship orders next week. We will send another email once your new synth leaves our workshop, but it may take a few days. Our goal is to have everything shipped by next Friday.

    Thanks for supporting open source music hardware,

    Peter Kirn & James Grahame
    meeblip.com

    then today i get this email —
    Dear bret frederick,
    Your order #1077 was cancelled because we suspect it is fraudulent.
    Please reply to this email if you have any questions or concerns.
    Sincerely,
    meeblip

    they took my money and called me a fraud!!!
    how can you take someones money
    and call them a fraud??? and not send the product i paid for???
    sound like meeblip is the real fraud!!!
    bunch of losers…..
    glad i have alot of REAL synths and dont need a little peice of shit like this
    i was onlu buying it for a joke really…
    but now i know how these guys operate… slick…
    this synth will probably stop working in a few years…

    1. Brett – we responded to your emails this morning. Your order was cancelled because Shopify flagged it as a high risk for fraud. I explained why in my email. A full refund was processed by Shopify the moment we clicked the “cancel” button, but it will take a few days before the refund appears in your account.

      Peter and I have worked extremely hard to provide manufacture and deliver affordable synths and have no intention or ripping off you or any other member of the synth community.

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