Erica Synths Pērkons overview: A uniquely thunderous drum machine | Engadget

In reality, after years of principally making extra laidback and ambient types of digital music, I discovered myself dialing in harsh, blown-out guitar tones, a la Nine Inch Nails Broken to jam together with Pērkons. I used to be transported again to my highschool days of black t-shirts and lengthy greasy hair. And I wasn’t mad about it.

The one tip I’ve is, preserve that drive knob pinned and be beneficiant with the compressor. I feel a part of why I used to be a bit lukewarm on it at first was as a result of I used to be making an attempt to be refined and even handed with dialing in these results. Which, frankly, it was in all probability fairly silly of me to count on subtlety from a drum machine named after the Baltic god of thunder.

Once you settle for the sound palette at your disposal, it’s a must to come to grips with the technical features of Pērkons. This is the place issues can get somewhat messy. While programming in a primary 16-step drum sample and enjoying it again is comparatively easy, a number of the extra superior features aren’t all the time that intuitive. At least at first, I’d extremely advocate preserving the handbook helpful. Even if simply to reference what the parameter knobs are controlling for every voice mode.

The Pērkons is decidedly old-fashioned in its strategy to interface design. There’s no display screen or menus to dive by means of. Instead, nearly the entire machine’s features from the sequencer playback mode, to the shuffle proportion to the LFO goal, are managed through the 64 step buttons or 4 set off buttons. This implies that mainly something past merely inputting particular person drum hits requires urgent some mixture of two or three buttons concurrently.

For instance, if you wish to set the chance {that a} specific step will play it’s a must to maintain down the step you need to change, the chance key and one of many 4 set off buttons to pick out a proportion (10, 25, 50 or 90 p.c). The profit is that, because you don’t should do any menu diving, it’s easy to control a sample whereas it’s enjoying. And as soon as you determine the fundamentals of how the interface works, it’s fairly straightforward to understand since every thing is labeled. The draw back is that some issues have comparatively restricted choices, like chance. If you need to have a step to have a 33 or 75 p.c probability of enjoying, you’re out of luck. Similarly, shuffle is in predetermined percentages, although these aren’t labeled.

You additionally should watch out to hit the buttons you need in the correct order. If you press the sample / ratchet button earlier than you begin holding down a selected step, then you definately’re not going so as to add a ratchet, you are going to change patterns. And should you haven’t saved the one you had been at the moment engaged on, will probably be gone for good. Pērkons may be enjoyable, but it surely will also be very unforgiving.

Even although the interface is old-fashioned, Pērkons does have quite a lot of new-school options to assist preserve it from being too robotic. In addition to shuffle and chance, you may change the size, add accents, multiply or divide the tempo, choose one in every of 4 “grooves” and select one in every of 4 completely different playback modes: ahead, backward, ping-pong or random. And every of those may be accomplished on a per-track foundation. So you may make observe 4 solely 13 steps lengthy and ping-pong from starting to finish and again at half velocity, whereas observe one performs at double velocity with a 50-percent shuffle and observe two has a singular groove however is barely eight steps lengthy.