Stylophone Stylosette Touch Keyboard Cassette Synth

This is a nice fun stylophone great for adults and kids alike.

The stylophone comes in a cassette case along with various cables, tools, and screwdriver in another cassette case.

The stylophone is just over 10cm wide and is a handy pocket size so easily portable. It runs on 2 x AAA batteries which are included and features a built-in speaker and headphone jack for listening to the sounds without disturbing others around you.

Got this for my 3+ year old granddaughter. It’s perfect because it’s so easy to use and get fun sounds out of it. I got this over the Stylophone because she can simply play it with her fingers and not have to use the Stylus. Also at her age chances are she would rip the stylus cord out making it unplayable. I do have the Pink Stylophone to give her when she’s a bit older.

This product made by Dubreq is a ripoff of the Synth-a-Sette made by the small company, MicroKits.

The Synth-a-Sette has been available since 2023. Compare that with this “new” product from Dubreq and it’s clear they saw the Synth-a-Sette, decided to slap together a quick imitation, and use their already established name to sell it. Everything from the name, the design, the need for no stylus, the plastic cassette carrying case, and the clip attachments that allow you to connect conductive objects (spoons, fruit, etc.) are the exact same as the Synth-a-Sette.

As of writing this, the Stylosette is currently not available on Dubreq’s official website. This Amazon page is most likely a way for them to get a bit of data before officially launching their unoriginal product in the coming months.

It’s such a shame that Dubreq decided to rip off a product from a much smaller company. Please do not buy this and support a small business instead.

I’m super conflicted over this product, and frankly kind of disappointed that Stylophone/Dubreq has created it. I’m a huge fan of the original Stylophone, I think the Stylophone Beat is a work of genius (you’ll find reviews of both of those products that I’ve done on Amazon), and I think they made the theremin into a practical musical instrument this year with their latest product.

This, though, has me very perplexed: a nearly identical product, the Synth-a-Sette by MicroKits, has been on the market for the last couple of years–note the incredible similarities in my photos. They’re nearly the same size, have nearly identical packaging/presentation concepts, and are functionally quite similar, too, though I’ll get into the differences below. Their product names are eerily, maybe deceptively, similar. Both are also being marketed for their potential use in STEM settings by using included alligator clip accessories, with which you can connect the little devices to basically anything that can conduct a signal, like fruits and vegetables, and make music by simply touching them. When one considers that MicroKits only has two products on the market, and that Stylophone has recently been showing how cool their original designs can be, I think it’s kind of a bummer that this product is such a copy of the livelihood of another small business. You can get the Synth-a-Sette on Amazon as well, by the way, when it comes to this particular product, I’d have to recommend that one over the Stylosette, because this all feels ethically kind of gross, to be honest.

Functionally, the Stylosette works basically fine, but isn’t quite as finessed as the Synth-a-Sette. The immediate thing I noticed when turning it on is that its touchpad isn’t very sensitive–I practically have to lay my fingers down flat to make it work. There’s no clear way to adjust that, either, which is ironic, as the original Synth-a-Sette’s touchpad is very sensitive out of the box, and also offers a way to adjust the sensitivity directly on its circuit board. Since that’s the main interface for the gadget, that’s a big minus for the Stylosette out of the gate.

Both devices run on 2 AAA batteries, which are included, but the original can also be powered with a USB-C cable when needed. No such luck with the Stylosette, which isn’t a huge surprise, as the whole Stylophone line is battery-only. This can be a little frustrating if you’re trying to use these as “real” instruments, though.

Both have the same limited 1-octave keypad range, along with a pad for bumping everything up an octave. Both also have a way to add vibrato–on the original Synth-a-Sette, this is actuated with a switch, while it’s done with another pad on the Stylosette. You can make adjustments to the depth and speed of the vibrato on the Stylosette, which can be useful at times, but I noticed that it never sounds quite as “smooth” as the vibrato on the Synth-a-Sette, which is more musical to me.

Their fundamental sounds are slightly different, too. The original Synth-a-Sette sounds a little more “pure” to my ears, for whatever that’s worth, more like a classic vintage synth sound perfectly filtered to be both nostalgic and musical. The Stylosette is a bit harsher, more sawtooth wave-y, which can be nice in its way, too.

As mentioned earlier, both devices come with alligator clips as accessories, so that you can connect to whatever conductive objects you’d like. On the Synth-a-Sette, you clip these just in front of the touchpad; on the Stylosette, one end of the clips has been stripped to bare cable to be inserted in a pin pad on the circuit side of the device. This pin pad offers some other interesting ins and outs for CV control between devices, but given their limited range and battery power, I don’t see much practical application for those more modular-friendly ins and outs, unfortunately. Kind of interesting that they’re available, though.

The one place where the Stylosette has a clear advantage is its inclusion of a little delay circuit. It’s a low-fi sounding thing, but it behaves like an old-school analog bucket brigade delay. This means that the delay times overall are relatively short, and that when you max out the repeats, it can self-oscillate, which is kind of fun. Presumably it’s the same circuit found on the new Stylophone Theremin, and I think it’s especially useful on that instrument, as the inherent glissando of a theremin gets a lot more body with a bit of delay behind it. While it’s cool having delay onboard this tiny gadget, I think most folks who would avail themselves of the potential of running something like this through delays probably already have tons of delay pedals or plugins at their disposal, too.

That delay circuit is why I’m giving this two stars instead of one, though. It’s really the only innovative thing here. On the whole, I still feel sad and disappointed in how derivative the Stylosette is. The Synth-a-Sette feels like a clever, fun little product that fills a niche that was previously unaddressed in the microsynth world. The Stylosette feels like it’s trying to stomp directly on the Synth-a-Sette, and in the small world of synths, this just doesn’t feel like a goodwill move. I’m still loving the Stylophone Beat, the incredibly well-conceived Stylophone Theremin, and I’m looking forward to the Stylophone drone synth expected sometime in 2025, but I’m not feeling good about the Stylosette.