Still, someone more familiar with the software might fare better than me. I’m not convinced that you could accomplish that with Studio One and an Atom SQ. That being said, it’s entirely possible to use Ableton Live from a Push and never look at your computer screen. It can’t quite match the size and scope of what you’d find on Abelton’s Push 2, but it’s also less than a third of the price. While you won’t have any issues navigating menus on the device, finding your way around Studio One’s larger interface is a bit of a struggle. Its size is a bit of a limiting factor, though. You’re not watching movies on this thing, obviously it’s just there to offer visual feedback for changing settings and parameters. The screen, too, is decent enough and the viewing angles are solid. My complaints are mostly minor: the pads are a bit stiff and the encoders can be slow when changing things like filter cutoff or anything else you might want to manipulate live. I’ve certainly experienced better, but I’ve also used far worse. The knobs, pads and buttons are all quality components. I probably wouldn’t subject it to the rigors of tour life, but it should easily survive trips to Starbucks or the occasional family vacation.

Obviously, when the entire point of a controller is its tight ties to a DAW there’s not much need for other ports, but with the growing interest in hardware instruments a TRS MIDI jack would have been nice.Įven though the body is all plastic, it still feels solid. Connectivity-wise there’s not much here, just a USB-C port. It would easily fit in a bag and is comparable to Elektron’s Model lineup in terms of size and weight, even if the shape is a little different. Not nearly as small as the OG Atom, but still quite portable.

So with that out of the way, let’s take a look at said hardware. This review instead is focused on the hardware of the SQ and its integration with Studio One and other DAWs. And until this summer I had not used Studio One at all. I have been learning it over the last couple of months as part of this review and as research for another story, but I am primarily an Ableton user. I want to set one thing straight: I am not a Studio One user. It’s larger, more platform agnostic and, at the risk of spoiling the rest of this review, almost a no-brainer for any Studio One user. The new $250 Atom SQ attempts to address these concerns while also striking something of a more unique and flexible profile.

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