The reverse cymbal is great if you want to add a little bit of groove effect and create drum loops. Both snares have wide ranging decay controls, which can go from long washes of sound to tight rim-like hits. The low and high toms are fairly vanilla, Roland-style sounds, but both have enough punch and body to cut through a groove. Although they can be sequenced independently, the two sounds share a pitch control, so it’s impossible to tune one without affecting the other. Both lean towards the low-mid end of the spectrum, making them good for techno-style bass.

Before getting into the details of the 10 drum synth modules, let’s talk about Color. This is a new feature unique to the Impact. As well as having editable synth parameters on the panel, each sound has a variant when it’s in ‘Color’ mode. You can latch a sound into Color mode indefinitely, or you can engage it on a per-step basis within each Pattern. To facilitate this, each sound has a second sequence layer for its Color state. The Color effect varies from sound to sound: it could be a drive boost, or different filter, pitch or decay settings. If you look at the chart above you can see an overview of the key differences between the Drumbrute and Drumbrute Impact. Below I take at a look at the differences in more detail, starting with the heart of both machines – the drum sounds.The mono main mix out is the tool you need to find this time. It is a common instrument cable that enables you to connect any music device such as a mixer, a guitar amp, etc. Do I Need To Connect Drumbrute With My Computer? Being in the lookout for an analog drum machine I stumbled upon this little beast! The DrumBrute Impact made quite an impression to me, considering the price and the features:

I think Drumbrute Impact sounds great with the build in distortion, so I would probably like to add analog distortion for bigger Drumbrute too. The Drumbrute has a ‘Zap’ part while the Drumbrute Impact has a capable FM Drum part. Of the two the ‘Zap’ part is the least interesting and is not ‘Zappy’ enough for my tastes. Don’t expect the Zap effects to send clubbers running for cover – it’s an adequate but pretty tame affair and something of a missed opportunity in my opinion. Whereas the clap is already drawn-out when it reaches a decent pitch, the snare is incompetent in offering sculpting options.Everything from straight forward pounding rhythms to more complex phasing polyrhythms, you’ll enjoy every moment of the step-sequencing thanks to the intuitive controls that removes the obstacles between you and your music. If you can’t get enough cowbell then note that the Impact comes with one pad for 808 style Cowbell (shared with Cymbal) whereas the Drumbrute offers Tamborine and Maracas instead.

The Arturia DrumBrute Impact is a small-but-mighty drum machine boasting full-size controls, super-fast workflow andraw analogue drum sounds. Raw Power and Monstrous Tone The Impact’s FM Drum unit, meanwhile, is a much more versatile percussion and sound effect generator part based on FM (Frequencey Modulation) synthesis. Four dedicated knobs give you control over Mod Pitch, FM Amount, Carrier Pitch and Decay. Turn up the Modulation and the FM Drum is capable of some interesting tones. It obviously isn’t going to be as capable as a dedicated FM synth but it is an easy to use and proves to be a useful sound generator. Color mode can be activated for the FM Drum too. When it comes to built in effects you’ll need to decide if you’re a filter or a distortion kind of person! With the Drumbrute you can toggle a high-pass/low-pass Steiner-Parker filter on and off and adjust the filter’s resonance control.

Drumbrute Impact contains no sub-menus, touchscreens or anything else that takes you away from physically “feeling” the control you have over your music. The essence of hands-on, old-school beatmaking. One of the most fun things about using the DrumBrute Impact is inevitably going be the touch-strip just underneath the volume control. There are rhythmic divisions from 1/4 to 1/32 notes, and this can either add a beat repeat effect to the entire pattern, or create rolls when a pad is held down simultaneously. Rolls can also be recorded into the pattern itself. Patterns can be captured as live recordings from the pads simply by engaging the record button in the transport area at the top. Live recordings align to the grid, based on the current pattern’s resolution (16ths by default), unless you toggle the Record button into Unquantised mode. The pads are velocity sensitive as far as MIDI output is concerned but the sounds themselves play at just two levels: Accented and non-Accented. Live Recording is clever enough to capture the sequence with Accents based on a velocity threshold. If you’re looking at purchasing one of the Drumbrute machines it can be a bit confusing to know which one to plump for so in this article I will compare the two and offer some opinions and advice and hopefully this will help you decide which of Arturia’s drum machines best suits your needs.