About a week ago a shiny new Ver­mona DRM MKIII ana­log drum syn­the­sizer arrived in the mail. After bring­ing it into the stu­dio and intro­duc­ing it to all it’s new friends, I plugged it in and have spent every extra moment with this thing since. It sounds absolutely fan­tas­tic.  There are 8 lit­tle syn­the­siz­ers baked into this thing each spe­cial­iz­ing in a spe­cific drum sound.  You have Kick, Drum 1, Drum 2, Multi, Snare, Hi Hat 1, Hi Hat 2, and Clap. But of course, with every sound para­me­ter hav­ing a knob, the range of sounds that are pos­si­ble are not lim­ited to these generic names.

Kick, Drum 1, Drum 2 all can sub­sti­tute for fab­u­lous Tom, or bongo sounds. Drum 1 & 2 also have exten­sive ana­logue FM bell or siz­zle capa­bil­i­ties. The Multi chan­nel is great for claves, cow­bells, and other tonal per­cus­sion. The Snare sounds incred­i­bly rich and it’s unique char­ac­ter really stands out with fast rolls or flams. Both Hi Hats sound dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent and have quite a range allow­ing you to go from snappy tings to buzzy vin­tage elec­tronic cym­bals. The Clap on the machine also is very use­ful for sup­ply­ing a fast break­ing impulse noise, and it notably also has a warm sound para­me­ter that sim­u­lates reverb.

Sound aside, what impressed me the most was the build qual­ity and the sev­eral addi­tional touches that allow this tool to really shine in the stu­dio. You can tell that this prod­uct was designed by the tal­ented engi­neers at Ver­mona from the ground up; a great deal of thought was clearly put into how to make the machine as use­ful as pos­si­ble within a mod­ern stu­dio. For instance, my favorite fea­ture on the whole machine is it’s abil­ity to take an insert effect in it’s indi­vid­ual chan­nel out­put jacks. These out­puts are more than just 1/4″ mono out­put jacks to send the indi­vid­ual drum out to a mixer. Depend­ing on what type of cable you feed them, they will per­form dif­fer­ent tasks. A mono cable will dis­con­nect the sound from the main outs. A stereo to mono cable will leave the sound at the main outs and route it out the indi­vid­ual out­put. Finally to my joy, a stereo Y cable to 2 mono leads will allow you to send the audio out to an effect & then accept a return sig­nal on that chan­nel. This insert abil­ity in addi­tion to the optional CV/Gate inserts on the back panel allow this drum syn­the­sizer to roam free in the untamed world of mod­u­lar syn­the­sis. Exper­i­ment­ing with this has returned very reward­ing results.

I have read some arti­cles on the web that moan about the lack of exten­sive midi imple­men­ta­tion on the machine. It’s true, it is very basic; but midi is not what this machine is all about at all. This Drum Syn­the­sizer is about get­ting your hands dirty. It’s about turn­ing knobs, tak­ing full con­trol of each sound and where the sound goes. It’s about how the sounds are trig­gered, or how it it inter­acts with your other gear. You get to define it’s rela­tion­ship with your other equip­ment and it’s place in your music. If you have an adven­tur­ous spirit, you might even become a bet­ter sound designer with this thing. Already it’s given me many ideas to try with other gear. If you are only look­ing for a device to con­trol every para­me­ter and pre­sets via your DAW, you’re bet­ter off choos­ing a drum rompler, or soft synth like Waldorf’s excel­lent Attack vir­tual drum synthesizer.

To sum it up, the Ver­mona DRM MKIII has renewed my faith in drum syn­the­sis. I have often pre­ferred to mak­ing drum sounds on my other more fea­ture rich syn­the­siz­ers, or using sam­ples via Native Instru­ments Bat­tery than to using some of the off the shelf drum mod­ules, but I was pleased to find that a ded­i­cated box like this one brings so much new cre­ativ­ity to the table when it comes to drums. You should not under­es­ti­mate the sheer fun fac­tor of this machine, it’s totally a hands on expe­ri­ence that can eas­ily become an addiction.

If read­ing this made you at all curi­ous about what it sounds like, here’s my first track using the Ver­mona DRM MKIII. Made in honor of the machine itself. Viva la good design!

Fol­low Be Bet­ter Stu­dios on SoundCloud