Engine is 8 separate tracks of sequencing, each of the eight tracks can be for a synth or an 8 instrument drum track.
This means you can freely choose to have any combination of 8 drum or synth patterns playing simultaneously. If you choose to have 8 drum tracks, you could sequence up to 64 different drum instruments (8x8), with control over accent velocity.
Or you could choose to sequence 8 synth tracks, with full control over note pitch, velocity and length. So if you looked at only the drum sequencing, it would be comparable to four machinedrums.
Each of the 8 tracks is completely independent, sharing only a master clock, so that means you can have different pattern lengths, different timing, different shuffle amounts, different step skipping, etc, if you wanted to do polyrhythms or polymetric sequencing.
There are a ton of other cool things over and above this, if anyone has questions.
We hope to have our new website and the Engine manual online in the next few days, so that should provide additional details.
The price we are targeting is just slightly more than $650 for the base unit and between $100 and $150 for the CV expansion board.
We delayed the CV board a bit to improve it in several key areas. Specifically, to allow for bipolar CV output, with a range of -3V to +7V with a 16-bit, 8-channel DAC.
The expansion bay has been designed to allow other types of expansions in the future, so we didn’t want to lock everyone in to only having CV/Gate and paying for it.
Interesting expansion options would be things like additional MIDI output ports, built in synth voices or drum instruments, etc.
We are hand assembling all of the Engine units here in Texas (in what was formerly my music studio)