Rainy Day Hailstorm Percussion Sequencer: Touch your Grooves!
Rainy Day Hailstorm by Otem Rellik is a four-voice drum synthesizer and sample player with four colorful touch strips for control. Get ready for lots of fun beatmaking action!
Rainy Day Hailstorm
Developer Otem Rellik, creator of such masterpieces as the Raspberry Pi FM Touch Synth and Cirrus FM, announced earlier this year that he was starting a new company. Now we know what he’s been working on: The new Rainy Day Hailstorm is a quirky 4-voice drum synthesizer and sample player that puts your grooves at your fingertips.
Each of the Hailstorm’s four tracks controls an internal drum synth and a sample simultaneously. You can blend between synthesis and samples using the Mix knob to create interesting layers. Each track also sports a capacitive touch strip for programming beats and controlling various parameters.
After programming a sequence in Record mode, you can use the Mode button to select the parameter to control (level, pitch, decay, shuffle, effects). As parameter changes are instantly visible, this makes for a very hands-on beatmaking experience.
In addition to this, the Rainy Day Hailstorm offers global Decay and Reverb controls that affect all tracks simultaneously. There are also four mute buttons below the touch strips, which further add to the performance capabilities.
The Hailstorm has 8 MB of memory for user samples, which you can import using an SD card. So it’s clearly mostly about drums and short hits, as opposed to longer loops. The internal memory also has room for 12 sample kits and 12 sequences.
In addition to MIDI In/Out (TRS-A), there’s a USB port for power and MIDI. Furthermore, the Hailstorm has a stereo line output and analog sync I/O. The developer says that the sync jacks accept pretty much any analog sync signal, so it should work with volcas, Eurorack modules, or most other devices.
Offering just the right combination of features and hands-on control, the Rainy Day Hailstorm looks like a whole lot of fun!
Price and availability
The Rainy Day Hailstorm is available from the developer’s web shop for $495.