VX Drums

Six analog-modelled drum voices — kick, snare, clap, rimshot, and a pair of hi-hats — with a trigger input each and nothing else. Every sound is synthesized, so the knobs reshape the drums themselves rather than a recording of them. This is the kit from the VX Drum Machine with the sequencer taken away: the timing comes from your patch.

How it works

Patch a gate or trigger into a voice and it fires. Anything that makes an edge works — a Euclid, a Step Sequencer's gate lane, a clock divider, a Piano Roll's gate, a comparator watching an envelope. Retriggering a voice while it is still ringing simply restarts it, which is how a drum machine flams.

The columns are the kit, one per voice plus a master strip, and the bottom knob of every voice column is its level — read the row as a mixer. The closed hat chokes the open hat, the classic trick for playing a hi-hat line on one pair of circuits, so a closed-hat trigger cuts an open-hat tail exactly as it does on the hardware.

Reach for the VX Drum Machine instead when you want the patterns, the sixteen memories and the built-in clock in one panel.

Controls

  • BD — TUNE sets the fundamental (30–100 Hz), DECAY the ring

(0.05–1.5 s), PUNCH the pitch-sweep attack. The 808 mechanism: a struck resonator, no oscillator.

  • SD — TUNE moves the two shell modes, DECAY the noise tail, SNAP

the noise-to-shell balance. A 909-style snare.

  • CP — TONE sets the clap's band, DECAY the room tail, SPREAD the

spacing of the three quick bursts that make a clap read as hands.

  • RS — TUNE (300–1200 Hz) runs it from woody rimshot up to clave,

DECAY is very short by design, DRIVE adds bark.

  • CH / OH — TONE brightens, DECAY sets the ring (the open hat goes to

1.2 s), METAL moves each between pure metallic ring and pure sizzle.

  • MASTER — ACCENT is how much harder an accented hit lands; DRIVE is one

knob of saturation on the stereo mix; VOLUME is the output.

Inputs & outputs

  • BD / SD / CP / RS / CH / OH (in) — one trigger per voice. A rising edge

above 1 V fires it; the input has to fall back below 0.1 V to re-arm.

  • ACC — the shared accent gate. A voice triggered while ACC is high hits

harder and brighter, because the accent drives each voice's own circuit harder rather than just turning it up. It is read at the moment of the trigger, so the gate only has to overlap the edge — a stale gate can't accent a later hit.

  • OUT L / OUT R — the stereo mix: voices at subtle fixed pans, through the

master drive and volume.

  • BD / SD / CP / RS / CH / OH (out) — individual outs, one per voice, dry:

level and accent applied, drive and volume not. Taking a voice out doesn't remove it from the mix, so turn its level down there if you want it separate.

Tips

  • One trigger source into several voices through a multiple gives you a layered

hit — kick plus rimshot is an instant hard techno thump.

  • Patch a slow LFO through a comparator into ACC and the groove breathes

without you programming a single accent.

  • Send the closed hat a busy trigger and the open hat a sparse one; the choke

does the rest.

  • Individual outs into separate reverbs is the cheapest way to make a

synthesized kit sound like it is in a room rather than in a box.