Riddim n’ Ting: Teenage Engineering A New Dub-Driven Performance Box
Teenage Engineering has a way of making hardware feel like objects from a parallel timeline — part retro lab gear, part modern music tool, always with a touch of personality you don’t see anywhere else. Their latest release, Riddim n’ Ting, pairs the EP-40 Riddim Supertone groovebox with the EP-2350 Ting mic and FX unit, presenting a compact setup that looks like a love letter to sound-system culture filtered through TE’s quirky, design-first perspective. The visual language alone sets it apart: bold UI choices, a striking display that feels pulled from broadcast equipment, and a form factor built to be played, not just programmed. What’s fun about this drop is how it channels reggae, dub, and live hardware energy without feeling nostalgic or novelty-driven. Instead, TE brings those influences into a modern performance workflow — punchy sample playback, onboard synthesis, expressive FX, and a handheld mic designed for character and grit rather than pristine clarity. It’s raw, portable, and clearly meant for hands-on rhythm creation and spontaneous vocal play. Whether you're into dancehall attitude, dub echo swells, or simply like gear with personality, this feels like another unmistakably TE artifact: playful, focused, and full of movement.
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What it is
The Riddim n’ Ting setup is made of two parts: the EP-40 Riddim Supertone, a compact sampler-groovebox with a built-in synth engine, and the EP-2350 Ting, a handheld mic and FX unit designed for live vocal flavor and rhythmic triggering. Together they read like portable sound-system tools reimagined through TE’s graphic-driven interface design and playful ergonomics.
The Riddim Supertone gives you sequenced drums, bass, and melodic parts with a focus on immediacy — pads for triggering, a performance fader for expressive FX sweeps, and a bright, almost broadcast-style screen that makes it feel like a miniature console pulled from a music documentary frame. It’s not aiming to be a DAW replacement or a deep workstation, but a hands-on rhythm box with baked-in character and a sound palette leaning into heavy low-end, chopped percussive hits, and dub-friendly synth tones.
The Ting acts as both a mic and a tiny performance effects processor, with onboard echo, saturation, and lo-fi treatment built for hype lines, chants, and spontaneous texture rather than polished vocal takes. It also doubles as a trigger surface, making it feel like an instrument instead of an accessory. That combination — voice, FX, rhythm — gives this release a distinct personality: spontaneous, physical, and intentionally imperfect in a way that rewards movement and instinct over refinement.
Hands-on sound & features
At its core, the Riddim Supertone feels like a rhythm-first sketchpad designed for people who prefer shaping ideas with their hands rather than clicking through menus. You get a curated set of drum and percussion sounds, deep low-end bass tones, and melodic voices that lean into dub, dancehall, and roots-adjacent sonics without locking you into nostalgia. The synthesis and sample layers work together in a way that feels immediate — tap out a beat, ride the fader for delay throws or filter lifts, flip patterns, then stack in bass stabs or chopped chords. It’s designed for motion, with every control asking to be touched rather than set-and-forget.
The FX behavior is where the personality really shines. Dub-style echoes, spring-like reverb textures, saturation, and filters respond in real time, encouraging performance habits instead of static programming. It’s easy to push things a little hot, smear delays into the groove, or create those classic “send the beat spiraling into space and bring it back on the drop” moments. Nothing feels overly polished — it’s more like playing with a small hardware desk and tape delay than working in a digital box, which suits the mood perfectly.
Then there’s the Ting. Rather than being a clean mic with a sidecar effects bank, it’s a character voice tool and physical gesture surface. Speak or shout into it, twist onboard effects, trigger accents or bursts, and feed all of that into the rhythm engine. It’s not about capturing a pristine vocal take — it’s more hype mic, dub toaster, rhythmic humanizer. When paired with the groovebox, it turns rhythm-making into a call-and-response process, where your voice, fingers, and timing become part of the groove. Even producers who never sing will find uses here — one-shots, noise bursts, filtered whispers, weird vocal percussion, or grungy spoken texture tucked under a beat.
Where it fits in the Teenage Engineering universe
Teenage Engineering has been steadily building a middle lane between their ultra-premium flagships and their playful pocket gadgets. The EP-series sits right in that zone — portable, approachable, and focused on creative friction in a good way. Where the OP-1 Field and OP-XY feel like futuristic control hubs and the Pocket Operators treat sound like a toy-box puzzle, the EP line leans into immediacy and physical presence. The EP-133 K.O. II brought that to beatmaking with chunky pads and a no-nonsense sampling ethos; the Riddim Supertone extends that idea into a more stylistic, performance-driven direction.
Visually, this one almost reads as a cousin to TE’s broadcast-inspired accessories and Field series interfaces — a sharp screen, bold UI decisions, industrial-meets-retro charm. Sonically, it’s less neutral than something like the OP-Z and more opinionated in its aesthetic than the K.O. II. This feels like a machine designed with a world already inside it. And pairing it with a dedicated vocal tool reinforces a through-line TE has been sketching for years: hardware as personality amplifiers, not blank canvases. You don’t buy this to emulate everything — you buy it because it has a point of view, and it invites you into that space.
Alternatives to consider
If you're drawn to the performance angle and portable jam-culture vibe, the Roland SP-404MKII is still the gold-standard for hands-on FX throws, sample flips, and building energy in real time. It leans less thematic and more versatile, but there’s overlap in spirit — especially if your workflow thrives on button mashing and send-FX chaos. For a sequencer-driven, multi-engine playground with a deeper feature stack, the OP-Z remains a compact powerhouse, though its screenless workflow is a very different personality than the Riddim’s bold display.
If you want something in the same performance-sketch energy but more electronic and less dub-coded, devices like the Elektron Model:Samples or Polyend Tracker Mini scratch adjacent itches — structured pattern building, tactile immediacy, and portable sound design. Those machines are more genre-agnostic; they don’t guide your ear the way the Riddim n’ Ting will. That’s the trade-off here: this isn’t a blank notebook. It’s a notebook with a rhythm imprinted on the first page. If that rhythm speaks to you, it opens doors quickly.
Conclusion
For musicians who thrive on immediacy, character, and physical performance, Riddim n’ Ting feels like a small invitation to loosen up and move with the sound instead of sculpting it into place. If you gravitate toward dub, dancehall, system-culture aesthetics, or just love gear that encourages grit and expression over polish, this pairing lands right in that space. It’s especially appealing for people who enjoy building beats live, hyping their own patterns, and shaping FX on the fly — not necessarily to make the “perfect” track, but to chase a feeling and capture it while it’s still raw. Whether you’re jamming at home, plugging into a portable setup, or building video content around real-time performance, this slot in TE’s lineup feels tuned to artists who treat energy as a primary ingredient.
Judged on those terms, it’s one of their more focused ideas — not a workstation, not a do-everything sampler, but a vibe-forward groove instrument with its own sonic lens. That’s its strength and its limitation. If you need deep sequencing, pristine vocals, or endless sampling capacity, you’ll likely want to look upmarket or toward more neutral machines. But if you want a compact box that feels alive under your hands, matches rhythm with personality, and brings a little theatricality to how you make sound, Riddim n’ Ting delivers a uniquely stylized lane.
Ready to hear what this little sound-system box can do? Click here to check price and availability.
Disclosure: This site contains affiliate links. If you book or purchase through these links, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the site and keeps my content free. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.