I was scratching around for a hardware sequencer and one of these came up on trademe for the same price as it would have cost for a simple analogue 8-step sequencer. The Electribe 2 (E2) comes with a bunch of on-board sounds and a decent helping of front-panel tweakery so I gave it a bash.
In short I’d regard it as a very cool groovebox but there are too many limitations to use it as a central sequencer. There are some strange design choices which just make it a chore for interfacing with other equipment.
There is a 16 part sequencer, and each track can only play on a specified midi channel. Incoming midi doesn’t pass through – the only way to do this is to record the midi, and only once it’s in the sequencer can it be sent to midi out. Control Change (CC) messages don’t get sent from the sequencer, only from the knobs. So although the E2 supports motion recording, it doesn’t send the information over midi. When recording notes using the trigger pads, all notes are predetermined (G2 from memory). You can go through the list editor to change the notes, but that’s pretty clunky.
If we disregard my original intent, however, this is a great unit for easily getting ideas down and there are a huge number of great sounds that are easy to sculpt. There are a few ideas for tracks I created which I doubt would have happened without this unit. The key seems to be to upload it to the MPC as a single loop, rather than spending time fleshing out sequences and transitions. This speeds up the process of recording/transposing midi and allows the sequencing to be done using a tool that is a little more intuitive.