Drum synth 2.90 the good and the bad

I'm going to apologise up front for the bad as there has clearly been a lot of work spent on this and its free but its very frustrating to get such a good upgrade and not be able to use it properly.


The good

Drum sounds are REALLY good, absolutely brilliant FREE upgrade, can make KILLER sounds!

New Drum multi FX are also really good, quite unique and definitely not your typical FX, it's really nice that someone somewhere is designing different FX, I'm mainly talking about the diffuser here, who designed these FX and synths?

Drum mixer is a really quick way of matching drum levels using the touch interface, I really hope this comes to the pad mixer.

Its free!

The Bad.

Drum synths sounds can not be layered with samples.

Drum synths should be called up WITHIN a layer, they would be SO good to fatten up weedy samples, very excellent opportunity missed, let's hope this gets implemented properly.

You can't mix drum synths and samples within the same kit AT ALL? , waaat? was this thought through at all?

EDIT DRUM MAP doesn't work, so now makes it impossible to layer over an existing sample kit , oh god..

Why have another mixer which is now not accessible with a button like before, you now have to touch the touch screen SEVEN times to get to the send fx from drum synth 1 in a multi, Then press it another SEVEN times to go back and then if you need to make further changes...yes another SEVEN times to make a small change, etc etc, its horrible, we already had a dedicated mixer button why hide things in menus, this is not a good move.
Why not just assign a drum synth PER pad, then you don't need a whole other mixer and all these illogical things as a result, i find it bizarre, why did they do it like this?

Can't access the new drum FX for use with your samples, really not good.

Can't access the existing FX from within a multi, this is a crazy maze of ill thought out U.i design moves.

You can't flatten pads, oh no...

No choke groups

Lets hope this mess gets sorted out because this could be a MEGA update without these bizarre choices, really undermine this great upgrade.

Also looks like no MIDI control over Drum synth parameters?
That would be SO good for Live performance, I'm hoping they didn't leave this out?

Fair assessment.

Can you bounce the sampler to an audio track and grab samples that way? It would be a workaround to layer over other drums.

Easier... you can just resample from the sampler

Another option

On track one load drum samples and play them. Then on track two, load the drum synth plug in and replay the drum sequence again. Then mix.

It’s the choke groups for me... However, I can just auto sample my hi-hats and then just put them in a basic program where I can create choke groups. And hey... I get more hi-hat samples that are made by yours truly!

The Bad
The natural presets are not acoustic sounds. They sound very bad.
The synthetic sounds are weaks. Comparing with Maschine+, the MPC drum synth sounds as a bad free VSTi.
A little bug: put a ride from Eighty (Init) preset and hear the nice noise after one loop.

The Good
Sorry I don't see.
Somes reported fixed bugs but Akai did not publish the list.

I think some of the sounds are ok, not the best, but some do have a unique character.

However the only point of having a drum synth inside a sampler is to have parameters you can tweak via midi. If you are not going to tweak the sounds, then just sample them, if you are just going to sample them - this could have been part of the software only, and not clog up my stand-alone.

Hi-hats without choke groups is silly.

Mind you I have a few drum synth hardware options, so this would only have gotten used if it was stellar.

Has anyone actually made music with the DRUM SYNTH?

I’ve enjoyed playing around with it, and I think it sounds pretty good. There’s a lot of mileage depending on how you play with the send fx and individual sound settings. That said, mileage will vary. It’s not perfect, but I consider it a huge step in the right direction (albeit, not what many of us had at the top of our feature request list). I just wish the drum synth mixer was better integrated into the OS’s current routing matrix. It’s a shame I can’t individually route sounds from the multi to audio tracks, sends, etc.

Drum Synth + Mother Ducker + Drum kit/Sample track + XYFX = GOLD

Plenty of different ways to play with it and layer it, just takes a lil bit of imagination

dsy73 wrote:The Bad
The natural presets are not acoustic sounds. They sound very bad.
The synthetic sounds are weaks. Comparing with Maschine+, the MPC drum synth sounds as a bad free VSTi.
A little bug: put a ride from Eighty (Init) preset and hear the nice noise after one loop.

The Good
Sorry I don't see.
Somes reported fixed bugs but Akai did not publish the list.

CharlesRandolph wrote:Has anyone actually made music with the DRUM SYNTH?

Made two new setups for tracks yesterday. Really digging all the options to shape the sounds and go wild pony on it.

All these ''cons'' are some-what funny to me and it reads more like people can't be creative or think of other ways to get to their result. Perhaps it's also the way i make music. When i make drums, i don't have a clear vision of what it will be or what I exactly want, i'm just jamming around and getting sounds i like, and put it in a sequence.

It's an MPC, we resample.

It's absolutely a killer synth, I just resample till infinity. Made 5 kits already and some kicks and snares have 50+ layers.

I used to spend long weekends on resampling and make my own drumkits, this is SO MUCH BETTER when having a synth like this.. I'm absolutely satisfied.

bees80 wrote:Made two new setups for tracks yesterday. Really digging all the options to shape the sounds and go wild pony on it.

All these ''cons'' are some-what funny to me and it reads more like people can't be creative or think of other ways to get to their result. Perhaps it's also the way i make music. When i make drums, i don't have a clear vision of what it will be or what I exactly want, i'm just jamming around and getting sounds i like, and put it in a sequence.

The only thing I found off was the qlink groups of the fx and send mixer of the multi. Other than that, I've made a couple of tracks using the sounds. Tweaked them, added effects, layered and kept it moving. The sounds work and as long as I can recreate Marvin Gaye's, "Sexual Healing" I living good.