Blinker
Stop losing track. Find the moment.
Going DAWless was supposed to bring you closer to your audience. But juggling multiple grooveboxes, synths, and effects often means a part of your mind is quietly keeping track of the phrasing.
You know the feeling: the room's energy is primed for a seamless change in the track, but you lost count while tweaking knobs. You hesitate, the drop comes in one beat too late, and the moment fades. Live music should not feel like a constant internal countdown.
Enter Blinker. A dedicated hardware tool designed to do one thing flawlessly: make predictable musical structures visible. By providing a gentle, undeniable visual cue of exactly where you are in a phrase, Blinker frees up your mental bandwidth. It gives you the space to play with unpredictability.
Key Features
A Gentle Visual Guide
Blinker is not an instrument demanding your constant attention. It sits quietly in your setup, offering clear visual reassurance only when you need it to drop back in perfectly.
Minimal Interface
Designed to assist rather than be continuously manipulated, interacting with Blinker is incredibly simple. The necessary functions are just one menu level deep. You set it up, and it quietly does its job.
The Anchor of Your Setup
Equipped with standard MIDI DIN In and Out ports (with the Out also serving as a hardware Thru). It provides rock-solid timing via two sync options: Leader mode drives your gear with MIDI clock, start, and stop signals, while Follower mode syncs perfectly to an external clock source.
Open Under the Hood
Powered by the open-source Zephyr OS, Blinker delivers a reliable out-of-the-box experience. In the future, Blinker's own firmware will become entirely open-source for anyone who wants to dive in and write custom code.
Specifications
- 12 LEDs indicating beat, bar, and phrase position
- Follow external MIDI clock via USB or analog sync
- Accurate internal clock generator for MIDI DIN, USB, and analog sync
- Set BPM to decimal precision with rotary encoder
- Tap tempo
- Quantised restart of the light pattern via the sync button
- Configurable inner circle count (beats per bar)
- Configurable outer circle count (bars per phrase)
- Configurable global clock division: 1/4, 1/2, 1x, 2x, 4x
- Configurable brightness (2 LEDs per light — very bright!)
Future Features
- Follow external clock from a sample-accurate audio source or MIDI
- Create presets and recall them via program change messages
- Configure the device by drag-and-dropping MIDI files via USB mass storage
Who is Blinker For?
Solo Electronic Performers
Connect your gear and finally get the crowd interaction you crave without losing your place in the arrangement.
Band Musicians
Sync your electronic backing sequences with live instruments effortlessly, keeping the whole band anchored to the same visible structure.