I will leave the TE fan/hate wars to the internet since I frankly don't care. The only thing that matters is if this gear works for me.
So first the elephant in the room. Looks are subjective, but I find it very cool looking except for that greenscreen (not because it's green but because it makes things harder to read for no reason). Other than that, I dig the design, not everything has to be in serious black with Ariel fonts.
The main reason I bought it was because I simply wanted a device that can record high resolution (as in "steps") MIDI for external harware synths, just the way I played it including pitch bend, mod wheel and CC controls and without unnecessary restrictions in number of tracks, length of steps and bars like most sequencers do, and then arrange the song with the recorded patterns and such. I am glad that EP-40 delivers in that regard, and frankly there aren't many options in the market that I know of that can do this (at least not even remotely close at this price range). This works great.
For me the sampling features were secondary since I don't really use samples in my productions, but now with this device, maybe I also throw a sample or two in my songs for some extra atmosphere (rain, wind etc) all while also sequencing my hardware synths as well from the same device. As far as I dug, sampling on the EP-40 works fine (hey it's foremost a sampler).
The sound coming out and the effects, are also prety good overall.
The Supertone synth engine is very limited though with basically 9 presets. Unless we are able to create custom presets for it, I can't see any use out of it unfortunately.
The overal workflow definetely needs getting used to. I sat down reading the manual top to bottom and this thing has more shortcuts than Photoshop. However there are also a lot of features packed in so I get it. The wacky icons also don't help in that, at least not initially. The features that I am interested in though (see above) are thankfully more straightforward.
The microphone that it comes with is free, so I won't even go on about it.
// Wishlist:
- Wish it was possible to enable Record while playing. Right now if you disable Record it is impossible to re-enable it. Makes no sense. We can only temporarily hold Rec down to overdub while holding...c'mon, why?
- Wish there was a system setting to always start from the first bar when hitting Play. Right now we need to Shift + Play to start from the beginning, but I would much rather preferred to always start from the beginning instead (and maybe Shift + Play to "continue")
- Wish it was possible to quanitize a single pattern all at once. Right now to quantize a single pattern (if it was recorded in freestyle mode), we need to hold down the correction thing while the pattern is playing (and notes are quantized while they are playing).
