An industrial drumkit for the Modor DR-2 (no external FX, no talk)

video upload by Richard DeHove

"The original concept for the DR-2 saw it as an enhanced 909. That's pretty much irrelevant now as the DR-2 has been developed into something far deeper. Yet you can still see traces of its origins in the step entry and many of the core sounds. Personally I'm not a fan of the 909 mainly because it keeps you penned into a defined territory of sound where weirdness is not allowed. I like odd sounds in my drum machines.

I think the great balancing act with drum machines is between providing immediate excellent drum sounds, and providing enough tweakable range to allow genuine sound design and experimentation. At one end you have untweakable machines like the 606; at the other extreme are samplers where the range becomes so vast you can get distracted by endless sample banks. One solution is to have both, but that leads to different problems where you have too many one-trick machines.

Where does the DR-2 sit? You can certainly feel it's 909 roots in that those sorts of kits and sounds fall out of the machine with almost no effort. You can hear that sound in many DR-2 demos: tight bass drums with rimshots, hats and snappy snares. But the parameters are wide enough, and the available drum models weird enough, that you can get away from that quite easily.

That was the aim here: Can the DR-2 move into a more industrial sound without any external processing? It's easy enough to dirty things up with fuzz and EQ, but what about the raw sound?

In the two demo tracks I use a single set of drum models (from left to right): Tom, Ride cymbal, Noise bassdrum, Claps, Claps, and Rumble bassdrum. Each pattern has a slightly tweaked version of those same drum models saved as a kit. I've used the internal tilt filter, parametric EQ and distortion. I'm not game to use the compressors yet - I still need to learn how to tame them.

On the first track I start with just two sounds and am using a polyrhythmic clock in 8/12 time on channel 3. It gives an unsettling feel and constant variation to what is otherwise a simple 16-step pattern.

Of course there's no processing or effects other than what you see. It's pure DR-2. Even the volume between patterns is unaltered.

(And as per the thumbnail image: The DR-2 needs an all-black version).

0:00 Arhythmia
2:02 Dirty Tom

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