Modor DR-2: A solo jam @180bpm

video upload by Richard DeHove

"Some drum machines are built for real-time tweaking, others you program and hit 'play' while you tweak something else. The Perkons drum machine is a real-time tweaker; the LXR-02 is more a playback machine. Where does the DR-2 sit? It certainly has enough knobs and if you can remember some of the (many) shortcuts then there's lots of available functions on the front panel. Then there's the six little knobs above the faders that can be assigned to any parameter per voice. Yet I've never come up with a parameter that I can't immediately access by the front panel anyway so I've never used them.

Here I'm doing pretty basic stuff. There's a single four-bar pattern and two drumkits. I swap between kits, mute various voices and change the overall bar length. It's also very easy to change the step length per voice (just hold down the voice letter and press the step number) but I didn't want to get too tricky since you can't just reload the pattern to reset the length. The pitch drifting synth sounds come from the portamento amount.

In terms of functionality it all works very smoothly. The only thing I find troublesome is that any drumkit or pattern above the first 16 can only be accessed by holding down the 17-32 button and then pressing the step number. That makes fast changes outside the first 16 patterns and kits much more prone to error. It would be much more logical imo if just selecting the number grouping (eg 17-32) meant that's what you automatically get.

If it all sounds a little gritty to you then good! I used plenty of distortion on most of the voices and even applied some compressor which can be quite vicious and I'm not even sure how to turn it off once it's on!

As usual there's absolutely no other processing than what you see. No compression, EQ or any other DAW effect.

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