Audiothingies DoubleDrummer Is A New Compact & Affordable 12-Voice Drum Synth / Sample Player

Audiothingies could already convince me in the past with their Micromonsta, an instrument that combine a powerful digital synthesis core in a compact form. As a small company, it’s always good to continue with what you already had success. I think that the dveloper has also thought this and today very surprisingly presented another product in the same form factor as the Micromonsta Synthesizer. The DoubleDrummer is a new 12-voice drum Synthesizer with sample playback capabilities and several effects.

Super exciting here is, the 12 voice drum engine is split in two interesting parts. 6 of the 12 channels is a full drum Synthesizer that emulates six different drum sounds (bass drum, snare, tom, clap, cowbell and hats). Every drum engine comes with several parameters to tweak and is very flexible in the sound. The other channels features 6 channels of drum sample playback with 56 internal drum sounds. With a clever engine feature, the DoubleDrummer can be transform into a 12-voice old school sounding drum sampler. In short: you can switch the 6 main synthesis channels in 6 sample playback modes.

It would be a little boring if you can’t invite import own samples in times of modern technologies. For this reason, the developer will ship the device with a PC/Mac software that allows to import own samples to the machine. To refine the sounds, you can choose for each channel one send FX’s effect: delay or plate reverb. On top of that, the DoubleDrummer features also a multi-FX (drive, sample-rate reduction, bit-crusher, 2 pole lowpass filter) on the master stereo bus.

In my opinion, an excellent new upcoming product from Audiothingies. To be honest, I have been waiting for such a product for some time. Many iOS apps can work with this workflow something longer already but cheap hardware device with such cool features are very rare. Especially for users of the ARTURIA Beatstep Pro, this device can be really interesting because you can transform the MIDI controller in a compact and transportable versatile drum machine. In addition, the price of this device is very good and affordable for everyone. If the developers produce enough units, I pretty sure they will sell a lot of these machines. Super cool release and really hope that I can check out this new product very soon.

Features of the DoubleDrummer by Audiothingies 

DoubleDrummer is a 12-voice drum synthesizer with sample playback capability. It is the perfect partner for your MIDI sequencer and your other hardware synths.

Synthesis

DoubleDrummer has 6 channels of drum synthesis (kick, snare, toms, clap, cowbell and hihats). Each of these 6 channels has been fine tuned to provide a wide range of sounds within a limited set of parameters per channel for the best possible user experience.

Bass drum: tune, attack, decay, pitch mod level, pitch mod decay time
Snare: tune, tone decay, noise level, noise decay, color, emphasis
Tom: pitch, low pitch, hi pitch, decay, pitch mod level, pan spread
Clap: attack, decay, color, emphasis
Cowbell: tune, offset, decay, harmonics, emphasis
Hats: closed decay, opened decay, color, emphasis

Sample playback

DoubleDrummer also has 6 channels of drum sample playback, with 56 internal drum sounds to choose from, within a wide variety of kick, snares, toms, cymbals, and other percussions. Instead of going for the hifi sound commonly found today, we chose to emulate the sound of the early eighties drum machines with a few of our own twists (think Linndrum, Drumtraks, DX, etc…) Remember having to burn EEPROMS for those machines? No need to do this here. It’s like having several dozens EEPROMS with sounds already burnt into it. Each of those sample channels have tune, decay, comp and a 2-pole lowpass filter with frequency and resonance parameters.

These channels can be useful to provide more natural sounding sounds that can be more difficult to synthesize with a limited parameter set, such as cymbals for example. But it’s also great for those “in ur face” 80’s kick and snare sounds. And if you really fancy these sampled sounds, the 6 main synthesis channels can be switched to sample playback mode, turning the DoubleDrummer into a 12-voice old-school sounding drum sample player.

Mixer

Color your sound: each one of the 12 voices is sent to a mixer with mute, drive, bit crusher, pan, level and fx send level per channel.

FXs

2 send FXs are available: delay and plate reverb. Each channel can send to one of these 2 FXs On top of that, you have a multi-FX on the master stereo bus. This master FX has drive, samplerate reduction, bitcrushing, and a 2 pole lowpass filter with frequency cutoff and resonance parameters.

Other stuff

• 128 memories for storing your kits
• USB MIDI
• A PC/Mac software will be available to send your own drum samples to the internal memory

Audio and video demos coming soon

Audiothingies DoubleDrummer will be available in November for 303 € (incl. VAT)

More informations here: Audiothingies DoubleDrummer