delta9's Reviews

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Modular swiss army knife used in every patch

Pretty much a Makenoise Maths, trading the attenuverter section for comparators and logic gates, which makes it more useful for sequencing and clock/trigger type duties. Both are based on the Serge universal slope generator. I originally tried to DIY a CGS DUSG but had a bad PCB. I DIY'ed the Befaco kit and it worked perfectly from jump street. Excellent documentation. Does wide-ranging envelopes, slew, variable shape LFO, limited saw-square-triangle oscillators (maybe 1 octave tracking at best), comparators, square-wave distortion, lowpass filtering, bitcrushing. Just check the manual, there is so many things this module can do I forget about them sometimes. I need another one. You could literally make a whole synth out of 3 or 4 rampages.

Old-school drum machine with some dodgy sounds and an amazing sequencer.

The Drumbrute is not for everyone. I view it as something like a CR-78 with an amazing polyrhythmic sequencer attached -- which to me is awesome, but I can see why some people wouldn't dig it. Definitely an old-school, 70's-era drum machine vibe. The sounds seem to need a lot of post-processing to sound good -- unlike say an 808 which just sounds good out of the box. Some sounds are not to my liking -- Kick 1 is intended to be 909-ish, but the pitch bend envelope is goofy and this makes it useless in 90% of knob positions -- easily diverges into 80's SynTom territory. Not good. If you dial out the bend and impact completely it is a kind of lackluster 909 kick. Sounds good with heavy distortion but I don't have much use for that sound. The "zap" is just stupid. The high hats are unique, can go from 808-ish to 909-ish, with some weird clangorous tones in between. The clap is great. kick 2 is a good but limited 606-style thump. The filter is not very useful as a performance tool, but useful for thinning out the high hats or taking top end off the snare. Despite my mostly negative review, I've been quite happy with the sound after some (heavy) individual processing, and the sequencer is good enough to make it worthwhile. This was one of only a handful of drum machines I found which could do polyrhythms/polymeters as well as randomization stuff. All in all a mixed bag, but definitely unique.

Obscure live mixer on dub matrix duty

This is not a well-known mixer and I had to do some digging just to get any info on it. I bought it used off ebay because I needed the 6 aux sends for dub mixes. It is essentially a 12x6 matrix mixer, plus 4 subgroup outs. Inserts and direct outs on every mono channel. Two stereo aux returns. The sound is "meh" -- typical late-80s/early-90's yammy sound reinforcement mixer. Nothing wrong with it, but not very detailed, to my ear heavy in the midrange. Input preamps don't have as much headroom as more recent mixers and are easy to drive into distortion -- especially because I'm mixing a lot of modular synth level (10 vpp) signals. Preamp distortion sounds good on drum machines, especially an 808 kick. Maybe comparable to 80's boss BX line mixers -- good for techno, but pretty low-fi. All in all, a hell of a bargain for the price I paid ($250), features-wise at least. When it got to me I opened it up and found a dead lizard skeleton inside that had presumably crawled in and gotten stuck, poor bastard. I had to reflow some solder joints to fix some intermittent connections, probably broken during shipping due to vibration and the age of the joints.

Lush, vintage-sounding OTA phaser with insane CV modulation capability.

Lush, liquid, vintage phaser. The input drive stage sounds good enough to use on its own, especially on drums. Turn the sweep off and resonance down, and use the main + aux outs to stereo-image a part to make it stand out in a mix. Extensive CV implementation. Using the sweep in jack, you can modulate 6 of the stages independently of the other 6 -- making it capable of Mutron Biphase emulation (a highly sought-after phaser used by Lee Scratch Perry among others.) Eliminated my phaser lust and stopped me having to build a Haible Krautrock phaser or Mutron clone. Hainbach on Youtube has a great video on pinging it for percussion sounds with the SQ-1. Can run up to 15v for increased headroom. Plans to make a eurorack jack field panel so I can patch it easier, otherwise you need a fistful of 1/4" to 1/8" cables or adapters. Really glad I bought one of these while they were still being made -- Moog discontinued all their pedals as of 2019 :(. Expect them to be outrageous on the used market!

Versatile CV/MIDI sequencing in a small package, huge bargain for the price.

Great sequencing tool, especially for the price. Two independent (though not independently clockable) or chainable CV/gate rows with pitch quantizing, CV range, slide, step jump, fwd/back/pendulum/random play mode, etc. Huge amount of depth to this little guy. The same features in a eurorack sequencer module would cost hundreds. There's some undocumented features regarding gate polarity, etc. Needs a real manual -- the poster sized multi-lingual instruction sheet folded down to the size of a matchbook and printed on tissue paper is garbage. I've noticed it has a tendency to scramble my sequences between power cycles -- after turning it back on, the notes have been shifted up or down randomly if they were in that "in-between" zone (seems like a rounding error kind of thing). I've speculated it's to do with unstable voltage from the USB power, maybe a solid 3.3v regulator on perfboard could help here. Huge amount of sequencing utility for the price, great addition to a modular system or cv/gate keyboard synths.

Huge bass, annoying MIDI

Monstrous, cavernous bass, huge and deep. Oscillators tuned for limited range so that bass response is prioritized, and it shows -- bass like no other synth I've heard except the Taurus line. Most of my gripes stem from the MIDI control implementation -- now that I'm mostly CV/gate I wish it could be disabled. For instance, it defaults to a sub-audible pitch (like ~1Hz, LFO range) until it receives a MIDI note. So if you power it on and start sending CVs, it's stuck in the 0th octave until you send a pitch via MIDI. (If anyone knows of a way to change this, let me know). I also hate the "hidden" features and function-button panel stuff. The LFO defaults to tempo-sync if you have a MIDI cable plugged in. I've considered selling it multiple times but I can never seem to let go of that bass. If only it could be de-midified so I could integrate it into my modular setup more completely, I'd be stoked.

1-to-1 clone with a few caveats

Almost perfect. Soundwise, indistinguishable from the OG. A few small problems with this recreation. I had no problem with the slim keys. I did find however the reduced fader throw made it harder to fine-tune certain sounds -- the filter cutoff especially. A longer throw would have been better there if nowhere else. Not sure I understand the Japanese obsession with making everything as small as possible. I wish the LFO had a free-run mode instead of retriggering with the envelope, as that makes it hard to do certain sounds (think Kalpol Intro). The envelope auto-trigger has a glitch when a keydown event interrupts the cycle, due to the aforementioned LFO retriggering. Some of the modulation depths seem weird -- I wish the osc-to-osc FM was stronger. The envelope could be "snappier" -- capable of more fine control in the very short ranges. I like my envelopes to go down to nothing but a zero-crossing click. But these are small gripes. The sound is there and that's most important.

Transparent, uncolored sound

Great open back headphones. Amazing stereo separation. Detailed, uncolored -- often unflattering! -- reveal of your mix. I stopped mixing on them because they have very un-hyped bass response -- as opposed to most people's listening setup on heaphones or in the car. If you mix the bass to sound good on these, it will be WAY too much on a car stereo or even normal listening headphones. I have a cheap pair of K77's that I check mixes on now because they more accurately convey what bass will sound like on the typical listening setup. These are great reference phones, but they are so uncolored that I don't find them pleasant to listen to at all.