Golden Master

I saw the announcement for Image Line’s new drum synth, Drumaxx today, and listened to the demos, and was impressed!  I am normally more interested in more esoteric or interesting sound design tools, but I have been looking for drum software that fits my needs for a long time. Until now, I’ve been disappointed with the offerings out there.  There’s a few, like waldorf attack, araldfx DKS, and some others, but I never really liked the sound or the functionality.  I own Sonic Charge’s MicroTonic drum synth, and even though it sounds great and is fun to use, it is sonically limited.

 

the synthesis section of the Drumaxx GUi

 

The difference with Drumaxx is that the engine is based on physical modeling.  This makes a big difference!  All the other drum synths out there have percussion synthesis engines that are, for the most part, based around filtered noise, oscillators, and pitch and amplitude envelopes.  The araldFX DKS plugin has a physical modeling component to it, but I found it poorly realized.

 

I tried it out, and bought it, and here are some of my thoughts.  First though, here is a simple demo track I made.  I sequenced Drumaxx from numerology, along with a synth patch in my nord g2.

 

Elcorian Fratart (locrian fart)

 

Firstly, the sound engine is fantastic and it has a very broad range of sounds. It is punchy and detailed compared to the other drum synths I’ve used.  I don’t know what the coders at image line did with this box, but I’m very impressed.   I don’t know how they managed to make it so you could squeeze ethnic percussion sounds, techno drums, weird effects, and acoustic kit sounds all from the same set of 10 knobs, but they did.  And they all sound good, and don’t have that fake, plastic character that’s bothered me with a lot of other drum synthesis stuff.  The percussion sounds great too.  Some of the percussion synthesis really sounds much better than the samples I have in my sample library, and I have a LOT of percussion samples.

 

There are some good and bad things about using the plugin.  Firstly, it uses a formidable amount of CPU–as much as some fancy reverb plugins or synth plugins.  But I attribute all that CPU usage to some sort of magic going on in the software that makes it sound so good.  Also, programming is a little tricky.  The knobs have a ridiculous amount of travel on them that has me really running my mouse up and down the desk just trying to get them adjusted to the right value.  And since the parameters are unfamiliar (instead of the traditional filter, osc, envelope stuff), it’s hard to know what is going to affect the sound in the way you want.  Thankfully, there aren’t that many controls, so I think it will become intuitive enough after I’ve gotten more familiar with the plugin.

 

All things considered, though, the GUI for this plugin is very good, and easy to use.  I am just complaining about the synthesis section.  Selecting presets, loading and saving sounds are all a snap, and I had this plugin figured out within 2 minutes of downloading and opening it.

 

The plugin has normal features for automating the parameters from within whatever DAW you’re using.  But I wish it was easier to assign CC’s to the different synthesis parameters, instead of having to dive through the massive list (16 channels worth) of different options.  I love the feature, for instance, in Sonic Charge’s microtonic, where you can assign CC’s directly from the front panel.

 

The velocity modulation section is also kind of weird.  It is hard to predict how the velocity will affect the sound.  And it doesn’t seem easy to just have the velocity slightly affect the sound you’re working on–the velocity modulation seems like it is either on or off, and sometimes you have to do a considerable amount of tweaking to get it working how you want.

 

Another thing that I might just be missing here, is that on the drumaxx website, one of the “plugin modes” is listed as “standalone.”  I can’t think of this meaning anything other than there being a standalone application.  I’ve downloaded both the PC and mac versions of drumaxx and this is nowhere to be found.

 

All together, I think this is a great drum synth, quick and easy to use, and more importantly, it sounds incredible.  Highly recommended!

 

Another demo, this one a lot less of a demo and more of just some weird sounds.  I was testing out using my Novation Launchpad to control a drum sequence that was being sent to drumaxx.  It seems drumaxx is good enough at withstanding some very serious midi abuse :D.

 

Launchpad Drum Sequence