Teenage Engineering EP Sidekick Overview

A New EP Series Mixer + FX Processor

Brian Griffith · 05/07/26

Teenage Engineering has expanded their popular K.O. lineup with a product that so effortlessly falls into the ranks, you'd swear it already existed. The K.O. Sidekick is a two-channel mixer, effects processor, and USB audio interface that fits into a jacket pocket and runs off two AAA batteries or a USB-C battery. Its design language harkens to the K.O. family, but useful enough that even if you've never touched an EP-133, you'll want to have one in your stable.

Both channels get a 3-band EQ with three selectable flavors, a gain control, a fader, and a compressor on the secondary layer (accessed by a long press of the Gain knob). It's more processing and features than you'd expect from something this slim, but just par for the course for TE. Everything connects via 3.5mm TRS: two stereo inputs, a main out, a cue out, and an aux input that doubles as a daisy-chain port if you want to link multiple Sidekicks and grow your channel count.

The effects are genuinely fun and sound fantastic. Six punch-in FX per channel—Filter, Delay, Tape, Beat Repeat, Tremolo, Dub Siren—fired via a soft-touch pad with a paddle for real-time tweaking. The beat detection is the sleeper feature: it syncs effects to your audio automatically, so you're always locked-in. They're good enough that running a single source through and messing with the effects is a worthwhile experience on its own. Not to mention having an EQ and compressor on tap can replace a series of standalone boxes that might be occupying too much real estate on your desk.

The Sidekick is genre agnostic—you could even say all genre—and gear ignorant. Whether you're deep in the TE ecosystem, have a higgledy-piggledy collection of audio devices, or just need something to DJ you iPods with, this mixer is designed for you. Plug it into a laptop and it becomes an 8-in/4-out USB audio interface and MIDI controller, which changes the math considerably. The Sidekick is what it is: a small, well-built mixer that does more than it has to. The compressors work, the EQs have character, the effects are worth using. EP-133 (and their kin) owners should probably just buy it. Everyone else should at least think hard about it.