Sample anything, chop it, and play it as hard as you hit — sixteen pads with real velocity, in your pocket. And the tape has been rolling since you opened the app, so the take you didn't plan is already on it.
The pads below are a real kit — kick, snare, hats, the rest. You know what to do.
Tap something at 2 a.m. — the morning will judge it fairly.
You hear something worth keeping — a record, a voice, a room, a phrase you just played. Then comes the laptop, the new project, the input you have to pick, the file you have to find. By the time the tools are ready, the thing you heard in your head is gone.
P–16 is already in your pocket and already listening. Grab the sound, trim it, drop it on a pad, and hit it — as hard as you want. Glass can't weigh a finger, so it calls two witnesses: the contact patch, and the jolt the strike puts through the phone's motion sensor. It plays like an instrument, not a grid.
Then the pattern catches what you played, and LINK strings patterns into a song. The whole loop — sample, chop, play, resample — happens in one screen without leaving the idea.
And the tape has been rolling since you opened the app. The last four minutes of everything you did are always behind you, so the accident you could never repeat is already recorded — you just drag back and keep it.
It arrives deliberately unfinished: no factory-finished songs, no tabs, no settings page, no save button. The kits start empty because they're yours.
“One screen, faceplate order, top to bottom. No tabs, no settings page, no save button — everything keeps itself.”
— the P–16 field manual
The 404 is the ancestor and the partner. The page order matches so moving between them feels like one process — build the sounds on your 16, play them on your 404 — and the SD card is the bridge between the two.
Not a re-creation — a continuation. If you love the hardware, you'll feel at home here; learn here, and the hardware will feel like home too.
The whole manual ships inside the app — tap the wordmark. Cards run in the 404's own page order, so what you learn here works over there.
P–16 broadcasts MIDI clock, counted in samples so it cannot drift. Light the antenna and the J–17 falls in step, the T–6 rolls with the transport.
One key sends a cut straight to the tape machine — it lands on T–6's FROM P–16 shelf before you get there.
The same cut can file onto the library's SOUNDS shelf — find it next month, on any device, in L–1.
Build on the 16, play on the 404 — the kit exporter renders every pad to 48 kHz WAV for its SD card, and the sample picker reads WAVs straight back off the card. One pair, two stages.
Also an Audio Unit — aumu · p16i — the pad grid in a plugin window, mirroring the kit you're on.
$9.99 on the App Store buys the instrument for iPhone and iPad. On the desk it’s $29.99 for the Mac app and AUv3 — or $79 for the whole Rack. No subscription, no unlocks, nothing expires. What you pay builds the next machine.
$9.99 at release. Free to test right now — leave your email and we'll send you a build.
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