I hear all of this for real. Was in a similar boat.
I ended up picking this because for some reason the UI just clicked with more more than many other drum solutions I’ve tried. I was getting stuff I liked very quickly, which I can’t say about many other plugins.
Instead of exporting the midi pattern (or in addition to, maybe by simply dragging to arrangment)…
I’d like to take a page out of the Renoise Redux Approach:
You make many different patterns, and they are linked to certain notes. C2, C#2, etc. All the way up, or whatever makes sense to develop. I’d be fine with like 24 variations.
Anyways, now you can just sequence a single note to play a whole sequence for however long you want and switch to different single notes when you need to change it up. It lets you make sequencers for bridges and breakdown sections and plan ahead.
Huge bonus points if they could figure out something akin to the Analogs’ direct jump feature, so you could overlap notes in the piano roll to jump to a crazy fill, but end up right where you were. That may be harder to implement.
I see the comments like “I’ll wait till its $29 to buy” but does this actually happen. I know PA are known for these kind of sales but does this always happen for all their plugins?
…usually, over 90% of their sofware products end up in some super sale or give away gift attached to certain offers…always timelimited, as they pull that “last chance” promo card quite a few times through the year…pretty much same as everywhwere…so many plugins out there, that do the same same but different and only a very rare selection can stay the test of time and become mandatory in what they do…
like fabfilter code…i never ever saw them available totally underpriced…they vary a little, but in essence, they always cost what they cost…but they are kind of a studio production standard…
vast majority of plugins never get there…
same goes for sonic charge products, by the way…but they don’t use that unified front end security gate plugin alliance…and can’t nail the point, when this next middleman policy started…
and sorry to say so, but especially with unfiltered audio, while always unique and top notch in what they actually can do for u and ur sound, always climb down the price ladder…
i mean, i really paid full price for lion…to see it now as a free add on gift when purchasing battallion feels pretty strange and top notch inflationary…and the same goes for all their fx plugins…always paid serious pric tags for each of them…and they all do great…but now i could purchase them for a fraction…
I really love the many different synth engines like terraining and shame. I think every synth/plug in should have an engine called “shame”!!. Also Radiator, Pillow and Zap for Kicks hmmm…
the performance page is such a great generator for variations in ALL directions, whether subtle or drastic and makes this highly playable.
Cloner and Phase warp are two pretty interesting sampler modes I have not seen yet anywhere else.
The maximiser in conjunction with the different clipper modes gives you a huge pallette of “glue”
This plus the pre/post filter distortions can make some serious noise.
As a gamer I dig that I can navigate the plugin with my keyboard using WASD.
sure would love to see a fleshed out pattern system, but while jamming with it, I actually never really missed it because of how tweakable every part, including the sequencer is.
I love µ-tonic, Opal, DrumComputer and all the other options out there.
And I used them many, many times.
Battalion is a new instant classic and a brilliant option in everyones toolkit. whether you bought it for 129€, 29€ or got it for free.
happy sequencing everybody
Thank you for your detailed reply, I appreciate it. So I guess the real question is, should I resist or buy it now! The plug-in looks great and I’m have a “I want to buy something” feeling.
…bottomline is always…consume or create…
tickling ur gas purchase/must have reflex is THE common thing for all of us to likely fall for…
and sure, in this early days of information age, all starts to drown the consumer in increasing inflationary ways…on one hand, that unified copyright protection mega sale gate keeper middleman inventions like plugin alliance, were are great thing to all sorts of code developers, since to create on top of all ur efforts even ur very own sale protection measuresments and personal shopends is overwhelming to do, so any solution to unify that is a good thing in first place…but as everything, it get’s out of hand, at some point…
but whatsoever…let’s get back to battalion, which is with no doubt, a pretty amazing sonic tool for where it’s at in modern music production…if u need a tool for advanced beat and basic harmony designs, it’s a great pick and investment…and if u really want to take advantage of it, u better pay the actual price, even knowing, that it will drop at some later point in time…and .time is the only resource u never have enough of…
Nicely put! I’m not sure if these “flagship” ones ($200ish “RRP”) ever go as cheap as $29, maybe there’s the odd sale where this happens but I feel like if you want it now, $99 with Lion isn’t a terrible deal if you don’t have Lion and think it would appeal. The main thing putting me off is PA’s track record for feature updates (or lack thereof)
…ha…let’s be real…100 bux for battallion AND lion !?
that’s a killer offer right there…and .let’s be brutally honest on top of it all…these two plugins in any daw mainframe can let u create ANYTHING there is in modern music already all on it’s own alone…
Yup- Their software pretty much just has bug fixes and maintenance updates…better than nothing, but they are a company that just moves on to the next new product I think.
That said, Battalion seems to offer a lot out of the box, so if you like the way it sounds and works it is certainly worth as much as Drumcompuer which always seems to be around 100 bucks.
Been checking out demos for both and Lion looks like a killer sound design tool, pretty amazing it’s thrown in for free with Battalion. About to pull the trigger.
the feature list of every unfiltered audio plug in I have used in the last six years (starting with byome in 2018) seemed pretty complete to me.
their modular mod system is killer to this day.
their newer plug ins became instant classics for me (SILO, Needlepoint and TAILS are fxxking genius!!)
there was never a need to add any features tbh. when the code is good its good!
As far as Plugin-Alliance goes, don’t confuse that company with Unfiltered Audio.
But even with PA´s “in house” plug-Ins…what feature update do you expect from an ssl channel strip or a compressor plugin?
Battalion might not have “every single feature a whole synth nerd online community can come up with in 15 years”, but it is pretty damn close.
what is the lowest bpm Battalion will go in stand alone mode or is it vst only?
watching Benn Jordan’s video right now and now this thing is really giving me Teletone audio Tympo drum machine vibes, it’s like a cross between Tympo and Elastic Drums
He dropped a comment on the video that it’s entirely Battalion! I was happily surprised by that.
We have more of a roadmap with this one. Kind of some backstory but Dent 2 was originally supposed to be a simple 1.1 update with a bunch of new algos. As novice plugin devs, we botched some parameter settings, and adding more modes would have ended up breaking settings in existing projects and presets. That kind of retooled our designs to try to get everything in for 1.0 since there were so many unknowns. Additionally, the old team at PA was pretty resistant to feature updates. Our new team at NI has been incredibly accommodating, down to getting us access to their enormous samples collection for us to curate the Battalion library. They’ve been enormously helpful and I can’t thank them enough.
This time around was the first time we didn’t get everything in place for 1.0, but we’ve been at it for over two years and it felt already like an incredible instrument, so we were at least comfortable with the release and it gives us space to better design some of the missing stuff.
So, I’m generally resistant to sharing future plans (since things like car accidents, aneurysms and global pandemics exist), but here’s a rough outline of the things we definitely want to add. This isn’t comprehensive as there are some other cool ideas that we’re still talking out:
First, we’re turning in a hotfix next week. This fixes the two largest bugs that made their way into release:
Crash from moving Performance Steps negative. I think this is the same crash as @Zelio with randomization, and randomization is just moving the Steps knob to the crash threshold. Still investigating, but both will be fixed. We didn’t hit this crash during a very active beta, so I’m worried a bad regression snuck in right before release. Speaking of which…
The stop button doesn’t work >_< This was a stupid mistake on my end and I’m catching a lot of YouTube flak for it The play, stop, undo, and redo icons had a color rendering error that was only visible in the light skins (which I definitely don’t use as much). PA’s video maker reported it to us as the marketing materials were being made, so I did a quick fix, tested it quickly in my standalone mode, and… shipped it off. Lesson learned.
Here are the more general things:
More engines. I axed out four synth engines (two noise generators, an inharmonic modal mode, and a minimal filter pinger) while Josh axed a really cool cymbal engine as those five were not quite as cooked. We do have ideas for more sampler engines as well.
Patterns! What this will look like is currently unknown, but we know that these are needed.
MIDI Output. We will for sure add live MIDI output so Battalion can trigger other things or the output can be recorded/manipulated. A lot of people have requested MIDI drag-and-drop export. I love the idea but won’t promise it yet because of how much is going on with the sequencer.
Toggled pitch quantization for the pitch knobs. This will be on by default for saved preset/project consistently, but it will be essential to turn this off for a lot of modulation purposes.
More algorithms for the maximizer. (Side note: we had a lot of requests to spin the maximizer off into a separate plugin. We’ve had a prototype since lo-fi-af and Needlepoint. Battalion’s maximizer is new, but we’re definitely considering a lot of things there).
More “distortion” modes, including one-knob not-distortion things (like one-knob filters so you can place a traditional filter before/after the comb filter).
Sequencer locks
More detailed global randomization.
Expanded MIDI input for things like start/stop, mute/solo, performance, and randomization.
Less essential things that we would still love to add but need to design:
Button to resample the current synth engine into the sampler.
Performance slots. If I can think of a nice design for morphing between slots like the Octatrack I would love to add it.
The play, stop, undo, and redo icons had a color rendering error that was only visible in the light skins (which I definitely don’t use as much). PA’s video maker reported it to us as the marketing materials were being made, so I did a quick fix, tested it quickly in my standalone mode, and… shipped it off. Lesson learned.