r/DrumMachine

You can make a wide variety of musical genres on this machine, but I always end up leaning towards hardcore fast paced stuff. This kind of reminds me of those final boss songs from the 90's.

CyDrums, Zoom R16. Please enjoy!!

I’ve always loved how raw and crunchy the original DMG sounds, and I think there’s a lot inside that machine that never really gets explored beyond the usual cute/chiptune sound.

A lot of “8-bit” plugins recreate the aesthetic with samples and presets, so I wanted to try something different and rebuild the actual DMG sound architecture in code.

It has the 2 pulse channels, wave + noise, sweep behaviour and hardware quirks, but I built a 16-step sequencer around it with per-note slide, an arpeggiator, 8 pattern banks and MIDI mapping.

You can also save/recall individual channels or complete patterns, which makes it pretty fun for live jams.

I called it BäRK BRÜTT.

There is a browser version completely free if anyone wants to mess with it**.**

Would genuinely be interested to hear what people manage to make with it.

Absolutely love the both of em what are your guys thoughts?

Here's a link to the PC-88 OST to give a clear listen to the drums, at least the snare sample. Does anyone recognize it?

Hey!

New JAM, new release! This time it’s a hypnotic, and aciiiiiiD releases Rotanev rec.

THIS SHORT CLIP is from "Enlil," and it's track 1 of 2 — dark, atmospheric, and built around some sonic textures I created with the Lyra‑8.

That windy, shifting sound is what inspired the name ENLIL, the god of wind. Fits perfectly, right? :)

Hey everyone — I made SR-16 Studio, a small free web app for working with an Alesis SR-16 from a desktop browser.

It lets you:

• Import MIDI drum loops and edit them in a 16-step sequencer
• Build one- or two-bar patterns directly in the browser
• Preview patterns on the actual SR-16 via MIDI
• Select SR-16 drum kits, send test notes, and monitor MIDI messages
• Send a compatible pattern to an empty User Pattern slot
• Load, send, receive, and save SysEx messages
• Keep a local pattern library in your browser — nothing is uploaded; import and export backups as JSON.

It is still early and made primarily around my own SR-16 setup, so I’d really welcome feedback from other SR-16 users.

I’d love feedback, bug reports, and ideas for where to take it next — especially around safely browsing memory dumps, longer arrangements, and kit mappings.

The SysEx pattern-transfer work is based on captures from a real SR-16 and has been tested with controlled writes to an empty User Pattern.

The app runs entirely in the browser and needs desktop Chrome or Edge for Web MIDI/SysEx.

Try it here:
https://deladriere.github.io/SR-16-Studio/

Source code:
https://github.com/deladriere/SR-16-Studio

Sonicware CyDrums, SP404A. Please enjoy!!

I built a small ESP32 drum synth called RudeBox.

It’s a single-voice synthesizer played from a regular electronic drum pad, with velocity-sensitive triggering and 8 controls for shaping the sound. It can go from toms and kicks to short noisy hits, pulse-wave beeps and ridiculous laser sweeps.

The synth is based on an ESP32-A1S / ES8388 audio board. The pad goes into LINE IN, the firmware detects the shape and velocity of the hit, and everything is synthesized in real time.

I wanted it to stay very simple and immediate — no screen, presets or menus. Just a pad and knobs.

Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgVX5p5UgE

Code, wiring and build details:
https://github.com/jakubthedeveloper/RudeBox

The enclosure also ended up deliberately a bit rough/lo-fi. It’s going to be used with my band, so I decided it was better for it to look slightly suspicious than polished. :)

Sound and synths used are from the factory installed sounds, stereo recorded in Logic adding a little loudness bump.

Been heads-down on this for about a year and figured this crowd would appreciate the guts more than the marketing page.

BeatForge — drum machine, step sequencer and REX loop player. VST3/AU/AAX/Standalone, universal binary. JUCE 9 (migrated last month), everything below the framework is my own code.

Bits that might be interesting to people here:

REX SDK. Wrote a JUCE wrapper around Propellerhead REX SDK 1.9, including drag-and-drop of slices out to the host. Bitwig still has no REX support, which turned out to be a decent reason for the plugin to exist.

Synth engines. ~5k lines of 808/909/modelling done from schematics rather than sample playback — VCA topology, click transients, pitch sweeps, the 909 tom triple-VCO, that sort of rabbit hole.

Antialiasing. Started with blanket 8x oversampling and it was eating CPU for no good reason. Replaced it with ADAA on the memoryless waveshapers (exact tanh with the ln(cosh) antiderivative) and linear-phase minBLEP saws at 1x, then a per-engine oversampling map — most engines run 1x now, only FMKick and the 909 snare need 4x. Built an offline FFT alias-measurement harness to verify it; alias floor sits around -90 dB. Worth noting ADAA-2 blew up on me under heavy drive — catastrophic cancellation, auto-mute and crackle — so everything is bounded ADAA-1.

Realtime discipline. Lock-free atomic slot for deferred time-stretch, ScopedAudioSuspend guards on live mutators, steal-quietest voice allocation. Debug assertions went from ~3150 to 3. auval and pluginval at strictness 10 both clean.

Also. Full undo/redo, NAM master-bus saturation, and a WASM build of the synth engines for the site via Emscripten and a hand-rolled juce_shim.h.

Happy to go into detail on any of it — the ADAA and REX wrapper work especially, since there's not much written about either.

Site + demo: https://www.beatforge.nl