Wunderkammer's WoO.1 Is a Pocketable Gadget for Musical Creation Any Place, Any Time

Hong Kong-based musical collective wunderkammer has launched a crowdfunding campaign for its inaugural product: the WoO.1, a compact just-about-pocketable gadget designed to be ready whenever inspiration strikes.

"With WoO.1 as the first product in our WoO.x series, this series is inspired by Beethoven's 'Werk ohne Opus' (Works Without Opus) — [a] lost in time masterpiece given no formal number," wunderkammer's Jiaxin Wu explains. "We encourage creators to step outside, listen to the world around them, and capture more inspiration sparked by nature, using simple loops to weave more beautiful compositions. Wunderkammer WoO.1 is the perfect option for this. We've chosen lighter materials and sacrificed some features. Among your many devices, it may be a small presence — but it could be an indispensable one."

The compact WoO.1 features a scissor-switched keyboard, volume and function knobs, an integrated speaker, a function control button strip, and — in place of a screen — a series of lights at the very top of its case. These are the loop indicators for its built-in "unlimited-track" looper, which can make use of 140 built-in sounds and 14 grooves while providing room for 140 custom samples. An integrated microphone can be used to capture samples to fill said sample bank, while the integrated battery is good for a claimed up-to 50 hours of use when using headphones rather than the internal speaker.

The gadget isn't just aimed at experienced musicians, though: the company claims that its LED-guided seven-track "Wunder Mode" provides an instruction-led quick-start that requires no prior musical experience. Other features include low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, and pitch-shift filters, polyphony support, finger drum mode, MIDI compatibility, single-track effect mixing, and an arpeggiator with quantize function.

The WoO.1 is currently funding on Kickstarter, where it has already far surpassed its modest funding goal; physical rewards start at $299 for "day one" backers, rising to $319 for "early bird" and $359 for the remainder of the campaign — all a chunk cheaper than the device's claimed $429 retail price.