Diego Capoccitti has released ImpulseDie – Symbiotic Drum, available for:
- Desktop – $9.99
- iOS – $4.99
ImpulseDie is a percussion synthesizer you patch with cables. It plays out of the box: with no cables at all the clock drives the loopers, the loopers trigger the four voices — kick, bass, snare and hi-hat — and the voices go to the mixer and out.
The cables are there to break that chain: let the kick play the bass, the bass bend the snare, the reverb clock the hi-hat. There is one signal domain for everything, so audio, envelopes, clocks and random steps are the same kind of signal: a kick can be an LFO, an LFO can be a clock, the bass can drive the looper.
And there is no step sequencer anywhere — the looper records the touch of your finger, how long it lasts and how hard it is, like a tape loop. A short tap is a hit, a long press is a held note or a drone, which is how one patch slides from rhythm to noise to drone without changing anything. Like analogue hardware it is never quite the same twice: a little noise, drift and bleed, which you can turn down in SETUP if you want it cleaner.
Features include:
- Inspired by SOMA Pulsar-23: a semi-modular machine where audio and CV share one voltage domain, and where noise, drift and bleed are musical material rather than defects
- Four synthesis voices — BD, BASS, SD and HHT — each with an attack-release envelope that follows the touch, so the same voice is a hit, a held note or a drone depending on how long you hold it
- Every envelope listens to the looper, MIDI and its TRIG pin at once and follows the strongest, falling back to the next when it ends
- 122 pins — 133 patch points in all — on a panel of 55 knobs, 10 selectors, 13 touch pads and 10 LRN buttons: any output into any input, pins that sum by themselves, and normalling that switches the internal circuit out when you plug into it
- Four independent tape-style loopers (one per voice, four banks each, 4 bars = 128 clock ticks at 96 points per tick) recording when you hit, how long you hold and how hard — plus a LOOP piano-roll view for drawing the same thing by hand
- Master clock from about 1 to 1500 BPM with seven divider outputs, synced to the DAW or to MIDI clock, or free-running — plus SHAOS, a pseudo-random generator with four outputs, 63 / 16 / 217 step lengths and a writable 16-step memory
- LFO from one cycle every ten seconds up to about 5 kHz, with shape morphing and SYNC — fast enough to be used as a clock or as a sound source
- Delay and reverb always running side by side in three modes (band-pass, double echo, pitch shifter), with an effects clock that can be modulated up to 7× faster — time, pitch and character move together, like a tape speeding up
- Parallel distortion on the whole mix, a set of utility modules (attenuators, VCAs, inverters, switches, pulse converters, diode, capacitors, dynamic sensors, MIDI to CV) and three tape players for your own audio files
- Ships as two builds sharing the same engine and the same license: ImpulseDie (instrument, with side chain on three jacks) and ImpulseDie FX (runs the audio of its own track through the machine)
- Mono summing bus as on the hardware, plus six separate outputs (BD, BASS, SD, HHT, DELAY, REVERB) to enable in the host for a stereo mix
- Play the voices over MIDI (BASS on ch. 1, BD / SD / HHT on ch. 10) with LRN on every voice and MIDI Learn on every knob; 80 parameters, all automatable; undo and redo on every gesture
- 148 factory presets in thirteen folders, most with a groove already recorded, plus a user preset manager (.imp patches) — preset files are shared with the iOS version
- Four skins and nine colour schemes, resizable window and panel zoom
ImpulseDie is available to PC, Mac and iOS users (VST3, AU, AAX and AUv3).
For more information on ImpulseDie – Symbiotic Drum, click here:
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