The Morphologist and DR.110 REDUX drum machine from Sound Machinery
Sound Machinery The Morphologist · Source: Sound Machinery
Sound Machinery DR.110 REDUX · Source: Sound Machinery
Sound Machinery have announced their arrival onto the virtual instrument scene with a could of Kontakt based instruments. DR.110 is a free drum machine modelled on the Boss DR-110 “Dr Rhythm”. The Morphologist is based on a combination of programs from 4 analogue synthesizers.
DR.110
It’s a very plain looking instrument for Kontakt with 6 channels of drums and a bank of effects. However, the sounds are pretty interesting. Behind every regular Dr Rhythm sound there’s a selection of alternatives which range from pitch shifted, to lo-fi, to glitched and distorted. You can then adjust the mix of original and “REDUX” sounds and add some effects.
It’s good sounding, simple and easy stuff that gives you a cool bunch of samples based on a classic drum machine. And it’s completely free.
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The Morphologist
Sound Machinery’s first proper product is based on samples taken from the Yamaha CS10, Korg MS20, Kawai f100 and Siel Cruise. Each synth is available independently or combined within the Kontakt interface, giving you some simple dial controls over each one. They can all be transposed individually. The “Polytune” control underneath the dials lets you detune the patches relevant to each other. There are 44 patches spread across all 4 synthesizers so it’s not exactly epic in scale. But scanning through the instrument presets demonstrates the variety of sound that can be pulled out of this machine.
There’s another page of interesting modulation possibilities. You have an LFO for the volume with a sync-able rate. A low pass filter, taken from the Native Instrument’s Pro-53, also has modulation options. There’s a noise section and a Leslie style rotary effect. Lastly, an ADSR envelope rounds it all off. I would have liked to see some sort of morphing going since it’s implied in the name, but I guess you could sort of achieve it with the mix knobs.
The sound examples in the video below are heavy on the pads. It has a delightfully meaty and lo-fi feel that’s really quite tempting. And at £19.90 it almost seems rude not to pick up a copy.
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Sound Machinery
I’m interested to see what else they might come up with. Everything appears very new, the website is very bare, Twitter and Facebook have only had the one post. The Morphologist seems to have gotten a couple of reviews already, but I haven’t come across it before. Also “coming soon” is the interesting looking Piana Obscura. It might be nice if they could fill in a bit more details of themselves but at least the walkthrough videos on their YouTube channel are helpful and informative.
More information on the Sound Machinery website.
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