u/iRustyNails

I think we all just misunderstood the Drumlogue. It’s a really good idea that never quite got the chance to fully unfold. It filled a very nice niche in the mid-price range, and I honestly think that if they had been allowed to carry the original concept all the way through, the $600 price tag would’ve been absolutely justified.

I love this device! Once I really put some effort into understanding its logic, I managed to get great sounds out of it even in places where I didn’t expect to — like the tom and snare tracks. And the separate assignable TRS outputs open up a ton of possibilities for external processing, dub-style routing, and convenient patching.

I used the analog engine for bass, while I filled the kick slot with external samples, and in the end I got this awesome jungle-like sound. 32 MB is way too little for samples — that’s ridiculous! It reminds me of the old-school MPC days, when that was real hardware and not some weak computer in a box. I converted my samples into Drumlogue format and loaded in no more than 20 MB, and that still gave me an excellent palette of amen breaks onboard.

The sequencer, of course, is not Elektron, but I’ve never owned one of their machines anyway, and what I got was more than enough for me. The only thing that honestly bothers me a bit is how limited the automation is for kick pitch changes, and the kick range itself leaves me a little disappointed.

And the real apex of all this is the custom units. I realized that I’m not really interested in synth engines there, but this thing could absolutely be the centerpiece of a budget-friendly yet very flexible dawless setup, especially if you add genuinely good spatial processing to it. That’s actually what got me started on writing a custom unit for it.

So in the end, well — if they make a Drumlogue XD, work through the mistakes, and don’t abandon the product halfway like they did with the original Drumlogue, I’ll be very interested. For now, though, I’m moving on to Elektron.