Today I finally had some time to test the new machines and wow, they are very interesting and rich, now the palette seems to be pretty full, and the Impulse machine may seems to be simple but combined with the self modulating filter and a bit of FM, it can produce things like this Bass Drum:
I remember being surprised when I first got my Rytm that there was no BD machine based on this classic technique. For decades electronics engineers knew that the best way to make convincing drum sounds with analogue circuits (with a natural decay response) was to excite a resonant filter into oscillation using a short pulse. (It is called a twin-t circuit based around the schematic looking like 2 letter T’s)
The PULS machine has somewhat addressed a lot of my dissapointment about the Rytm’s analogue voice capabilities, I found almost all of the BD machines to be quite lacklustre for actual Bass Drum sounds unless you wanted the pitch swept VCO kind of sound, or variations of it. As I said before, nothing inherently wrong with those sounds but I find that my ears tire of that sound quite quickly, for some genres they are just the ticket, but it can be difficult to get any real smoothness using the swept VCO technique. And yes the 909 type of BD is very easy to make on the Rytm, but a lot of other BD sounds until the PULS machine came along were more elusive.
I actually would still like to see a proper dedicated twin-t machine, as this would free up the filter for further sculpting, but as it stands the PULS machine is a very welcome addition.
