Baby Audio Tekno is a new, analog-inspired, hard-hitting drum Synthesizer plugin for macOS and Windows, featuring 18 distinct, fully tweakable drum engines.
Select, drag, and drop into the instrument, and you have a kick, snare, and other instruments for your drum pattern. With samples, it’s as easy as coloring a mandala. But you can also go into more fine detail by synthesizing drum sounds entirely.
For this purpose there are drum synthesizers where you can recreate kick, snare, tom, etc. based on synthesis. The latest one comes from the developers of Baby Audio, and it’s called Tekno.
Baby Audio Tekno
Tekno is a new drum Synthesizer plugin for macOS and Windows, combining the best of both analog and digital worlds.
According to Baby Audio, Tekno isn’t an emulation of a famous drum synth or drum machine but more an evolution of the underlying technology of these machines.
They play high stakes and say that Tekno sets the bar for the hardest-hitting synthesized drums ever put in a plugin. Ok, let’s see if that’s true.
At Tekno’s core are 18 entirely synthesized drum engines, mapped to a matrix that resembles a beehive. They combine authentic circuit-modeling, advanced synthesis, and classic drum machine techniques.
Some of the engines have an A and B sub-engine, and they are fully tweakable with various parameters. For example, the kick generator gives you control over the frequency, length, shape, click, and tone of the sound.
Then, you have a calibration panel that houses more parameters to fine-tune your sounds in detail. Additionally, each drum engine features its own analog-modeled effect section, providing effects tailored explicitly to the selected generator.
The kick generator has sub, exciter, tilt, saturation, and reverb, while the snare has dispersion, exciter, saturation, compression, and reverb as drum engine-specific effects.
All these drum engines can be refined with various master effects created in collaboration with Jatin Chowdhury, developer of the famous free ChowDSP effects plugins. It includes a limiter, reverb, and more.
Humanize and Randomize
Baby Audio plugins always have little goodies that make them very modern to use, including Tekno.
It features onboard humanize parameters, introducing extra variations in timbre, velocity, and timing. So every time you trigger a sound, it won’t sound the same but will have slight variations to make it more organic.
Furthermore, it features a smart randomization algorithm (represented by a dice icon) that provides instant, all-new drums with every click. There’s no sequencer included, which is why the article refers to a drum synth rather than a drum machine.
However, you can easily trigger all the sounds via MIDI with a MIDI keyboard, DAW, or external sequencer. Tekno launches with 73 custom kit presets from producers including Mr. Bill, Richard Devine, Virtual Riot, and Yoad Nevo.
First Impression
Tekno sounds very lovely and fat in the first demos. The extensive set of drum engines makes the drum plugin very flexible and versatile. In the era of AI-driven drum generation, etc., I find it interesting that Baby Audio has hardly incorporated this theme at all.
There is a smart randomizer built in, but no additional features that utilize AI drum generation, such as drums on demand or similar capabilities. As a synth enthusiast, I prefer a drum synth with this feature set, including more AI features, but it surprises me.
Baby Audio Tekno is now available for an introductory price of $79, down from $129, for a limited time. It runs as a VST, VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
More information here: Baby Audio
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