NUSofting Broken Drum Machine

Inspired by a combination of several old school beat boxes and the circuit-bending culture that revolves around cheap, and old, hardware musical instruments (such as the “toy” Casio and Yamaha keyboards of the 80s), Broken Drum Machine brings the lively, “ever changing”, circuit-bent drum machine sounds to your DAW.

BDM is a plugin instrument designed for the musicians who love chaos and usually find the unpredictable behaviour of an uncontrollable sound machine stimulating and inspiring.

BDM offers four drum pads in the style of an old beat box- one each for Bass Drum, Snare, Hi-Hat and Stick. Each pad features the usual suspects for shaping the synthesized sound, including tone, decay, pitch, pan and gain. On top of the standard controls comes the broken factor – each pad features its own sliders for chaos and chance. Chaos sets the amount of variations to the original sound, and chance is the probability algorithm for the chaos to occur.

By varying and automating the chaos and chance sliders, you can achieve a range of wild and unpredictable sounds, similar to creating glitches and bleeps by manipulating an analog circuit.

Each pad features a dual sound source- an analog modeled oscillator (VCO) and a built-in in sample playback engine (PCM). A slider allows you to choose between a pure VCO or PCM sound source, or a mix of the two.

The four drum pads of BDM are mapped across 12 midi notes (midi note 29 through to midi note 40), each providing different configurations of pitch and decay time. The higher midi notes (from midi note 47 and up) are used for pitch tracking the VCOs. The end result is that the humble 4 pad architecture of Broken Drum Machine is deceiving: The sound palette is in fact huge, with wide scope for variation and dynamics.

The output is configured as 1 stereo + 4 mono outs.

Suppose you want to customize the samples in BDM, or start with a different default sound, or even change the look of BDM completely: You need to get your hands dirty and create a BDM Modpak.

A Modpak replaces the contents of the BDM Folder in order to change BDM’s look and/or sound. Modpaks allow you to use a different set of samples for BDM’s PCM data; to set up a different default preset bank when BDM loads; and to completely change the graphic interface, from colors to shapes and knob types.

BDM is sold €30.90/$44.90 with one extra Modpack.

You can download a demo and listen to examples at this address: https://nusofting.liqihsynth.com/bdm.html