Arturia DrumBrute Analog Drum Machine

Analog drum machines keep getting more and more popular as Arturia  releases a new drum machine with not only excellent analog sounds but also many innovative, creative enhancing features that could take your beat making to new places.

Arturia Drum Brute

17 Real Analog Drum Modules

The DrumBrute applies brute force to the concept of drum machines by giving you straight up analog sounds, no modeling or simulating digital stuff here, you get the real deal analog with modern parameter control and live performance flexibility and features that modern drum machine beat making requires.

Sound List:

  1. kick drum 1
  2. kick drum 2
  3. snare drum
  4. clap
  5. hi-hat 1
  6. hi-hat 2
  7. conga hi
  8. conga lo
  9. tom hi
  10. tom lo
  11. maracas
  12. rimshot
  13. clave
  14. tambourine
  15. cymbal
  16. reverse cymbal sound
  17. zap

Polyrhythmic Madness!

Being able to create unique beats that stand out often required experimentation with drum pattern programming techniques, DrumBrute makes this easy and accessible by letting you control the length of each individual drum pattern track.   So for instance you can have a hihat repeating at six beats while a snare drum hits on the fourth beat, as the pattern loops you will get a dynamic, polyrhythmic effect.  This is just one simple example since you can program this across all of the individual tracks.  On many drum machines it is difficult to program this type of pattern logic since the whole pattern has a set length of four, eight, sixteen, etc…


Swing and Randomness 

Another key to getting a custom sound for your beats is to be able to apply swing in the right places.  When a beat swings just right it takes the robotic repetitive feel out and replaces that with a human feel or organic groove to the beat.  Randomness can also help by making the pattern more dynamic and real sounding.  While the human brain does like repetition, over time the repetition becomes boring and the brain will tell the listener to skip the track.  Listening to a lot of loop based music you can hear times where the track just gets boring.  Applying swing in the right way at the right times as well as sprinkles of randomness can make the track more novel to the human ear and thus a more listenable experience.


Pattern Looper

DrumBrute’s on board touch strip can control a feature called the roller or looper here you can roll or loop a pattern depending on the mode you set for the touch strip to control either the pattern looper or the pattern roller depending on how you set the touch strip.  With the looper you can control the loop start point, the loop length, 1/4 note being the largest and 1/32 being the smallest length.  The roller allows you to create rolls in real time, live.  Rolls are generated based on the time division selected in the touch strip area.


Accenting a beat gives you control over the velocity hit or loudness of certain parts of your drum pattern.  Accent mode on the DrumBrute gives you a way to accomplish accenting quickly and easily using the step keys and turning them red shows you that accenting is applied to a particular step.  Once you get this going the drum tracks will have a more dynamic feel as variations in the volume of the drum hits are programmed in the way you want.


Individual Audio Outputs 

The DrumBrute comes with individual outputs for all 12 of the on board drum sound tracks.  This means if you have a professional studio or one day plan on building one you can process each sound individually to do things like apply compression to just the kick drum, do a side chain from the kick to a compressor, limiter on a synth pad, apply reverb to a snare drum, the possibilities are endless, it’s all up to you imagination and creativity..

Chain Patterns

Creating a great drum pattern is one thing, but a good song needs often more than one drum pattern to be something people will want to listen too.  Chaining patterns increases the variability of your drum tracks and sequences letting you build an entire song.  The song mode is where the pattern chaining is done on the DrumBrute and you can choose patterns from any of the four on board pattern banks to build your song sequence.

Steiner-Parker Output Filter

WOOSH, gotta love me some filters, some filters are smooth, some are not so smooth the DrumBrute comes with a Steiner Parker output filter that delivers smooth high pass and low pass filters when you want that swooooosh sweep effect on your drum patterns. The filter controls are always in an active state regardless of being in song mode or pattern mode, a button selects between high pass and low pass and from there you can control the resonance and sweep frequency of the filters.


Who is the DrumBrute for?

People who want to make brutal beats! LOL!  The DrumBrute is reasonably priced under $500 so it’s not as expensive as many comparable drum machines, it is an analog drum machine so you;d have to be into that type of sound, it does not sample sounds but you can get a wide array of sonic exploration with all the parameters of an analog drum machine.  It’s probably not enough to stand alone on stage with although you’d be surprised on how melodies can be composed on analog drum machines taking one if the drums and making it onto a bass sound or synth type of sound, people do it all the time but you’ll still be limited

So this makes the DrumBrute an addition to say a computer DAW setup or an existing studio that wants to expand on drum sounds, Or if you just plain like making beats and want an analog brutal beast this one is for you.