Digitone 2 and Cydrums are both amazing for synthesizing drums or melodic synth sounds or just crazy noises. Digitone 2 for ease to make really nice musical classic drum and synth sounds and has the polyphony and arp features, plus they make it really fast and easy to dial in common sounds when you need one with the classic machines.
Cydrums for being able to make truly insane sounds quickly and its performance effects and modulation capabilities are totally different and really fun to use once you learn them. It has those things at the cost of the more familiar workflow and traditional LFO’s, but it’s deep and powerful and I really didn’t understand close to how good it was until I had one. I’ve still never used it as actual drums on a track because I keep being delighted by making synths I wouldn’t have otherwise and wild and crazy sounds that beg to be used in industrial techno or harsh noise whenever I use one of the drum structures. It is definitely harder to design sound on for me, especially the melodic synth structures, since the structures themselves (the mixing algorithm and its parameters for the wavetable oscillators) don’t respond as much to parameter tweaking as digitone’s algorithm parameters but once you start messing around with the wavetable choice and playback options, effects routing patches, and modulating the wave itself and that kind of thing, you start realizing how much depth there is. Sonicware crushed it IMO.
Number of things. I had a mk2.
The pads. The bugs.
The external form factor.
The grey colour.
How long it took to make a decent sound, and mix it all properly.
Mostly it was the pads and bugs (mine was an early model, I think they’ve sorted it out now). So I took some video and elektron granted a full refund via the shop I bought from.
Bought a TR8-S and never looked back. Zero issues ever. But this all way off topic.
Back to @B_LD (Tempest/Machinedrum)
Nice food for thought.
Thanks to everyone else providing some hints and ideas, too. I knew this wouldn’t be an easy game. Seems I have to spend some more time listening and diving into details … it may take a while. It’s summer after all.
Fascinating that you hit the limits so soon. Makes me a bit sad, but cool you found out you’re the synth sound design guy! Good luck with your search, curious to hear where you’ll land.
I am still learning Rytm and it sounds great if you feed it into distortion and reverb like to Analog Heat. All my drums need good compression, distortion, reverb and side chaining to sound massive.
cool place & very interesting setup you rocking there… is it to track your whole setup and to manage drums with the tempest(s)? meaning you and your apparent 4 hands. how is the signal flow?
This setup took quite a long time to arrive at, and some great gear was sold along the way, so this my entire setup, nothing is stored away. They key for me was to find what worked with how I like to make music, quite experimental layering of rhythms and sounds, textures etc rather than melody / composition.
I stopped using midi which has been awesome, I can run machines stop them, change tempo, set tunings and meters differently across them all then try to mesh it together somehow.
Signal wise each tempest goes to channel on the mixer, main and cue from each OT also get their own channel. Six channels in all then the really key part is the filter /eq on the model 1.
Like I say took a long time to get here!
Specifically for the topic - what I like about tempest:
Sound design to build atonal and exotic percussion kits - have lots of non standard tunings. Even built a harry partch 43 note octave which then accidentally deleted. But great for gamelan type stuff
Being able to copy pasted while sequence is running
Beat wide filtering and envelope and pitch adjustment is powerful, I can have a beat running, drop it out the mix and cue it from the mixer. Change tempo, pitch, filter and reverse it then bring it back in as an ambient pad. Then undo it with one button.
Mod paths can go deep on modulation
I couldn’t find in your post, where you would like to go …
natural sounds like real drum kits as good as possible
creative synth sounds, which excel at rhythmic roles
IMO for natural sounding cymbals there is not too much synthesis in the market but physical modelling … if samples are excluded. I prefer samples for cymbals because it seems more efficient rather to work hard to get it right from doing synthesis from scratch.
IMO kicks or low end drums can be done by many analogue circuits quite
well. For Bongos go Buchla …
For creative sounds across the entire track I love to use my Perkons from Erica Synths. Its sound engines, UI, and sequencer are fantastic and offer so many options to create drum tracks that breathe
If you want to be “unlimited” you could create a drum machine from Eurorack modules … there are many drum modules available … check out Erica Synths as an example …
OK, since nobody mentioned them yet (not expensive enough?)
1010music Razzmatazz is probably my preferred drum machine for sound design because it focuses on the right set of parameters. It does include a sample layer but I mostly don’t use it.
Volca Drum is great as well, and much broader-ranging than it looks.
For both of these, however, I wouldn’t use the internal sequencer. But you mentioned focusing of sound design - which is also my case - so I thought I might share these.
PS: I’ve also got the CyDrums lately, and love it so far, but I haven’t spent enough time on it to make a final decision about its capacity as a drum machine
if you really restricting yourself from using samples then modular or software is the really unopinionated drum machines, otherwise most of them come with some range and pre-definition of sounds or sample based sources.
tbh, I was never samples person either but I learned to love them in rytm, the combination of layering a sample with the synth part is the best, and the thing is - you don’t really need to build sample libraries or whatever, you can use any sample you have, I’ve uploaded bunch of samples from Live’s Core Library and I can just pick a portion of a sample and fill the synth sound with something different, filter them together and you never know it’s two sources blended, magic
