Hands On With the Grain Mk II, a Sampler the Size of a Passport
Grain Instruments shrank its sampler to the size of a passport and charged 349 euros for it. Three weeks of trains, soundchecks and one lost project later, here is what the spec sheet leaves out.
The Grain Mk II arrives in a box the size of a paperback and weighs less than the cable you will plug into it. Aluminium shell, bead-blasted, 122 by 79 by 17 millimetres, eight rubber pads and one endless encoder. It shows fingerprints like a phone screen and it fits in the inside pocket of a coat, which is the entire argument for its existence.
The pitch has not changed since the first Grain in 2023: a four-track sampler you can operate with one hand while standing up. What has changed is that this one is finished. The Mk I shipped with a sequencer that could not be edited while running, which is a strange thing to discover on a train.
The specs
- Price: 349 euros / 379 dollars. No charger, no card, no case in the box.
- Recording: 16-bit, 48 kHz, with a switchable 12-bit playback mode.
- Tracks: 4, with 64 sample slots per project and 128 projects.
- Storage: 2 GB internal, microSD to 512 GB.
- I/O: USB-C, 3.5 mm stereo in and out, 3.5 mm MIDI in and out with adapters included.
- Battery: 5.5 hours claimed. I measured 3 hours 40 at half screen brightness with MIDI running.
- Screen: 128 by 64 monochrome OLED.
- Weight: 190 g, or about two chocolate bars.
Three weeks in a coat pocket
I made eleven sketches on this thing and two of them turned into actual pieces, which is a better hit rate than I get at a desk. The reason is not the sound engine, which is unremarkable in the good way. It is that the whole instrument is reachable: record, chop, assign, sequence, resample, all without a menu deeper than two levels.
The built-in mic is mono, sits behind a slot on the top edge, and is noisy above about two thirds of its gain range. It is also the thing I used most. A radiator, a ticket barrier, a dog in the next carriage: none of that is a recording, all of it is material. Feed it into the 12-bit playback mode and the noise floor becomes texture rather than a defect, which I suspect is not an accident.
Then it lost a project. Firmware 2.0 could be put to sleep with a card write still pending, and on wake the project index was gone: eleven minutes of a piece I had spent a morning on, unrecoverable. Grain shipped 2.1 on 18 February with a note about write completion on sleep, and it has not happened since. It should never have shipped at all.
Other physical complaints, in order of how much they will annoy you. The microSD door is a hinged plastic flap and mine is already bent. The encoder is the same part number as the Mk I, whose encoder went flaky at month eight on two units I know of. The rubber pads are excellent, with real velocity response, and they are the reason the thing feels like an instrument instead of a remote control.
What the manual gets wrong
Page 24 says hold Shift and press Record to resample the master bus. It does not: Shift and Record arms the input. Resampling is Record followed by the destination track key, which is a better design than the one documented.
The signal-flow diagram on page 11 omits that the filter sits after the track fader. Automate a level move and you also change the filter drive, which will read as a mistake until you know it is deliberate. Once you know, it is one of the nicest things about the box.
The manual also calls 12-bit mode vintage character. It is a bit-depth reduction applied on playback, not on capture, so record everything at 16 and decide later. And the battery figure on the back of the box is measured with the screen off and MIDI disabled, which is a sampler nobody has ever used.
Who it is for
People who write away from a desk, and people whose desk has stopped producing anything. It is not a live-set brain. There is no timestretch, no per-slot modulation beyond a single envelope, and no wireless sync, so if your set lives or dies on locking to someone else's laptop, budget for a MIDI interface and some patience. The Seoul modular crowd have been using Mk Is as portable clock sources and recorders rather than instruments, which tells you something about where it fits.
It also does something quietly useful for anyone working in a bad room, whether that room is a van or a kitchen: it takes the decision out of the room. You capture, you commit, you move on. Half the reason Cathedral of Small Sounds works is that its source material was gathered by someone with no ability to second-guess it.
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