The Sound Board

The latest in a long line of "while we all wait for Spectrasonics to replace Stylus RMX", comes UVI's Drum Designer.





https://www.uvi.net/drum-designer#overview

Created for producers and sound designer of any genre, Drum Designer provides innovative tools allowing you to shape, pitch and tweak drum sounds in ways that would have been previously impossible or prohibitively time consuming. Born from a deep analysis of drum production techniques, Drum Designer delivers 4 specialised instruments along with a dedicated 8 part sequencer, a massive collection of 5,700+ samples, 2,000+ meticulously created drum presets, 316 kits, and more.

Regular price $149, $99 til Oct 1st.

(Looks quite nifty to me, though I don't think its my silver bullet. Wouldn't mind a demo though, which sadly isn't available.

The thing that seems interesting to me is that you can load individual part, kick, snare, etc.
It could be nice to replace the great but very limited ones in Maschine...

Yes, it seems well thought out from that perspective, sounds good too. All round it seems quite impressive really.

I always find the pattern engine of these things pretty clumsy, and not very creativity-inspiring. Toontrack is fantastic but they don't really do beats like this, I love the way Stylus works but it may as well be playing from wax cylinder at this point. This looks not too bad on that score, but I doubt it will rival either of those for getting interesting grooves going quickly and making them your own.

I thought I'd give this a whirl. It's a pretty good effort, there's a lot that's right with it, and already used it in a library track.

What's good:

The library is nice and diverse (though see caveat below). The way it is structured is that it invites experimentation, with all the elements made up of several sub-elements which are fun to swap and play with.

The pattern engine is quite nice, and I like how you can easily swap out any instrument's rhythm for another. Good for happy accidents.

There's a sep-out version of the main kit

There's tons of tweaks for endless experimentation - easy to create your own thing.

What's less good

2 bars only visible at a time, while many patterns are 8. That's a near-permanent frustration.

Some missing staples in the library - there's 808 kick and snares, 909 snares but no kick, for example. A grievous omission for a dance-focused product.

There's so many places to tweak it can take a while to track down why something isn't working. For pitch, there's tweaks at sample level, instrument level, Pitch tracking at instrument level and again on/off at sample level and an entire pitch part of the sequencer that may or not work as expected depending on the other settings. The downside to endless customisation is increased complexity, and personally I find that a passion killer.

No undo

No simplify. This is a wonderous control in Stylus and Toontrack have something similar - the right groove, but just too busy / not busy enough.

General thoughts

This last point hints at where I find the product wanting, and the reason why I still think we're underserved in this whole area. I love Stylus for its improvised-cookery approach to making beats - throw a load of stuff together, lock them, strip them down etc. I really am looking for something hands-on and musical like this, but with sounds from this century and a good modern search engine such as Toontrack's tap to find, matching similar grooves. I think the classic straight step-sequencer approach is always going to be mildly frustrating for me.

So all round - I quite like this, and I think I'll turn to it for the right projects.... for now. The moment my dream product comes along - likely the RMX replacement - I can see me dropping it like a stone.

Nice review Guy, thanks.
I think that's the thing - don't know if this is the case with this product, but I've always found it terribly time-consuming and creativity-sapping (not that I have that much of it to start with) to have to program drums / percussion from scratch - I think what I would like is tons of presets with some easy way of navigating / finding them, to see which of them sparks something/an idea, and then to have easy ways to both tweak them- like those 'busy/less busy' sliders, and then on top of that to have an easy way of assembling those tweaked patterns together into structural units, following on from each other. Sounds like a terribly newbie question I know (and it is!)

Indeed a thanks for the review Guy. I took the bite also yesterday and partly based on your review. I have Battery and a Maschine Mikro and it served me well so far for some standard things, but programming more up to date modern drums is not my strong suite. And having watched a few walkthroughs and reading your review it gave me enough to get this. What I like is that gives you a good variety of presets in certain styles to start with and to let myself go outside my own box. Another big and maybe the biggest for me is that it is easy to create or tweak a pattern and simply drag it over to your DAW. That is something that loaded me with Battery (used Beat Designer in Cubase sometimes, but that is not the best to be honest).

I am very used nowadays with working with Falcon and all feels good and solid in layout, though I can fully understand that it can look quite intimidating and holding of on the creative flow if you really want to go deep. That is also maybe the biggest advantage and at the same time the biggest disadvantage with Falcon, they have though about so many things, maybe even too much. But personally I like that.
Thanks again for the review Guy!

I always get nervous when i read that anyone takes any notice of any opinion I've ever uttered! Glad you're getting on with it though, Jaap.

Well your thoughts where clear and I could relate to them and probably saved me by having them because I could anticipate on some things and also take them into consideration before buying it, so it was much helpful and appreciated Guy!

The perils of being an early adopter. Sadly I've had to retire Drum Designer for now, after a torrid session yesterday.

There appears to be a bug, related to the different patterns that sit across multiple pages. There is a switch to select over how many bars the grid editor is effective. Somewhere between this and then editing the decay values itself, my copy would go nuts, changing all the sounds themselves by turning the decay values to full on all instruments. At least I think that's what it was doing - it just turned the entire kit into a swampy mess, and worse this was unrecoverable. Even reloading a preset, or loading any other preset is in this fault mode. The only way to restore normality was to reload the plugin completely.

Pretty disappointing.

You run it in the workstation I think (as you do not have Falcon right?) - will check if I can recreate this issue. Have not experienced it, but running it in Falcon (which should not make a difference though)

Thanks Jaap - yes, running it in the Workstation in Cubase.

I can't point to a specific procedure. First time it happened it was when switching to 0 bars in Event Link. 2nd time it happened at some random point when editing (I think) the decay values, with Event Link already set to 0.