I’ve been looking into a synth that will generate percussive sounds and drums sounds for awhile now. Drum machines ironically seem all a bit limited.
The idea is to get a simple machine to dial in synthesized drums quickly to sample into a sampler. “Single one shot hits “or similar - so no real rhythms. I do the sequencing on a computer. The machine doesn’t need a sequencer per sé. But ideally it has a small keyboard. The interface of the Model:cycles is perfect, but i’m unsure it is delivering in the sound department. Heared plenty of demo’s and most people seem to use it as a melody maker.
The sound of the Rytm I like very much but it’s a bit too expensive, and perhaps a bit limited without the sampler in terms of sound versatility.
The DFAM appears to be focused on rhythm and I feel it needs an external pitch quantizer.
Apart from a few, I never connected with Roland machines very well…
The new Dreadbox DIY box looks interesting. But isn’t available in my area apparently. Are shops selling these?
Eurorack is a rabbit hole I do not like to fall into. And its too expensive.
What I have used and may be dismissed from your kind suggestions
DT, DN, M:S, OT, A4, Minitaur, Nord 1, Virus A-B, Z-1, 707, 303, 101, 909, MPC’s, Maschine, JX8P, E-mu ESI, DX7, D50, Juno 60, Volca Sample, Polyend Tracker,
Evolver, and some other things that I can’t recall ATM.
What do you currently have access to out of this list, if anything? There are a couple of things there - Digitone, A4 and Nord - that I would rate above most dedicated drum synths I’ve tried, especially if they’re just being harvested for 1-shots and you don’t need to manage sound pools/drum maps/voice allocation/etc. Since you’re not using them in real time you don’t need to worry about managing polyphony either so you can stack up voices to synthesise different elements of a drum hit. Worth considering!
A few other cheaper bits I would recommend for drum synthesis:
Nord Modular G1 - has a handy drum synthesis module and is also flexible enough to emulate most other percussion synths. I’ve made Syncussion and Basimilus Iteritas patches on mine.
Volca Drum - very deep machine. Editing from the panel can be fiddly but you can just spam random patch and instantly fill up a sample bank.
Electribe ER-1 - simple at first, but the LFO/modulator has a huge range and it gets far more complex once you start stacking voices and working with FM/ringmod between tracks. I don’t have one anymore but I still use a huge folder of oneshots that I made just from randomising parameters.
2nd this.
While it may not be capable of real time adjustments, the way the user interface and design model work makes it easy to create exactly what you want, save for analog distorted sounds
I did really enjoy the dfam, and could have spent much more time sampling one hits from it before selling it.
Thanks. It’s not exactly what I’m looking for.
Looking for knobby synth that is well suited for single hit percussive sounds.
So I think it needs a ring mod, an audio rate lfo / basic fm, noise gen, sinewave, finetune per osc, 2osc’s, … perhaps band pass filter
I don’t know what kind of sound you’re after but the model:cycles is great for all kind of industrial drums, noise, technoish stuff. Melodies is not what I use it for:
If you want deep synthesis for drums, the Digitone is king. But you already dismissed it so… since you mentioned both model:cycles and analog rytm, the Syntakt is like the blend of these two and it’s also much easier, direct than the Digitone. Guaranteed results with little to no effort.
Since you want lots of knobs, maybe check the Erica synths Perkons. But frankly you could also get a Syntakt and a simple controller like the Faderfox PC4.
Oh but Syntakt + Faderfox is over 1200€. That’s way too expensive for this one task only. Syntakt seems dope, but too advanced for a relatively simple task
I don’t want to give you advice you don’t need but is all that’s putting you off the Nord that it doesn’t have knobs? If all you’re looking to do is capture one-shots why is that important?
The Digitakt is the best drum machine I’ve used - but you’d be getting the one shots from somewhere else and knobbing them on the synth - is that not the way you want to be doing it?
Like on Model:Samples