DoubleDrummer: 12-voice drum synth and sample player

23 Sep 2017 by Robin Vincent | Approximate reading time: 2 Minutes

Audiothingies DoubleDrummer · Source: Audiothingies

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From Audiothingies comes a rather neat looking little box of drumming trouble. The DoubleDrummer is a 12-voice drum synthesizer that can also playback samples and gives you some effects to play with.

DoubleDrummer

You’d sort of expect this to be some sort of groove machine – the layout does give that impression. But it’s not. DoubleDrummer is a drum synthesizer, a source of sounds rather than a music production device. It could certainly be argued that we have enough sequencers and groove makers and what we actually need is alternative, tweakable and easy to find sources of sounds. DoubleDrummer could do that. Connect it to your DAW or the MIDI output of another groove box. It would pair up nicely with the Arturia Beatstep Pro.

DoubleDrummer has 6 channels of drum synthesis covering the usual suspects of kick, snare, toms, clap, hihats and, of course, a cowbell. For each channel you get up to 6 parameters to control on the 6 knobs – tuning, attack, decay, that sort of thing. The website says:

“Each of these 6 channels has been fine tuned to provide a wide range of sounds within a limited set of parameters per channel for the best possible user experience.”

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Which is nice.

Sample Playback

Synthesis is only part of the story, DoubleDrummer also supports up to 6 channels of sample playback. Comes with 56 kits ready to go and they’ve leaned towards the sounds of the 1980’s. You can transfer your own samples across via USB with the forthcoming software editor. There’s room for 128 kits.

FX

Within the mixer, you can drive and bit crush, pan and mix and then dial in either of the two sends. At the other end of the sends are a delay and a reverb. Finally, on the master bus you have more bit crushing, a low-pass filter and some overdrive.

Audiothingies are heading for a November release. Currently there are no all-important audio or video examples. Ultimately it will come down to how good it sounds and easy it is to tweak. At €303 it’s well priced for the feature set. Looking forward to seeing it in action.