just to chime in with my two quatloos (and 400 on the newcomer! *ahem*... sorry... recovering trekaholic ^_^ )

i love arpeggiators, and was always disappointed i couldn't find many - for a long time in the late 80s & 90s they kinda fell out of fashion, and it wasn't until the "analog revival" that companies started including them in synths again, though there are no current dedicated standalone hardware ones (that i know of). but over the years i've collected a few: Florian already mentioned the Oberheim Cyclone (at the time i got it i had to special order it; probably one of the last ones made before Oberheim went under), a Music And More MAP1 (another one i was glad to get since it seems MAM disappeard off the face of the earth completely several years ago), and an Akai ME20A, which isn't an arpeggiator per se - it's a "sequence arpeggiator": you record the notes/chords seperately from the pattern, which can lead to interesting and unexpected results.
there's also the arpeggiators in my V-Synth & V-Synth GT which are phenomenal! my Dave Smith Evolver and Prophet '08 also have simple arpeggiators, though they only trigger the internal voices and don't transmit over MIDI (which is actually kinda cool, since it lets you get wild with multiple layered different patterns). the one in my microKorg is certainly serviceable as well.
and you already mentioned RPG8 in Reason. and now with Reason 6.5 and their new Rack Extensions third-party protocol, i'm sure someone will eventually come up with a new dementedly psychotic multi-arpeggiation module for it (i hope anyway...).



Heh, I'm glad, thanks. :) The gist is that I don't know of any standalone hardware arpeggiators, but it should be possible to build one. I think in general MIDI doesn't lend itself too well to a modular approach, but an arpeggiator would be a (perhaps overlooked) exception to that rule.

All the best,
Zoë.


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