The story
Initially released as a freebie to farewell 2020 (because at the time, it seemed fitting that 2020 would end with a giant robot shooting lasers from its eyes), now available from here!
At it’s core it’s 8 samples taken from a Juno 6, recorded direct and spread across the keyboard in 8 different groups to form a simple monosynth. Nothing special.
However:
– The mod wheel is mapped to bend those samples out of tune in differing degrees AND spread them across the stereo field.
– The XY pad controls the cutoff of a 4P LPF on the X axis as well as a super short, high feedback delay and distortion mapped to the Y.
– The 3 sliders are Attack + Release (self explanatory) and Crush (Bitcrushing that gets extreme).
– Pitchbend is still standard pitchbend so you can do diving detunes…
Between these controls you can absolutely destroy those 8 samples. If you want polyphony just increase the Max voices in the Kontakt panel.
Stay Safe, Stay Sane, Make Noise.
– Chris.
Interface
Reviews for Drone-a-Tron
- Sound
- Character
- Playability
- Inspiration
- GUI
Leave a review to let others know what you thought of the instrument!
One of its kind!
This is an incredible synth instrument that has true potential of becoming something crazy good. The sampling is phenomenal, and the sound is incredible right away. The pitch-bend, the mod-wheel and the bit-crush controls are just way too good at making this instrument shine.
The best part though is the XY matrix, which is what makes this one unique. You can make custom evolutions so damn easily, and you don't have to do anything crazy in order to make it sound crazy. It is just that simple. Just remind yourself to tune down the volume a little bit because it can get very loud by default.
The GUI could use a small touch up to make things more user-friendly, such as having better spacing, better element separation, and a display for the modwheel state, since some users may want to bind it somewhere else. Speakng of binding, the worst part of all this is that the XY axes are not bound to any CC numbers, but you can control them manually if you enable R/W of midi information from your DAW.
Nevertheless it's a fantastic little beast, with a size of just 14MB, which makes it an easy addition to everyone's library without any hesitation.
Synthesizer playground
Chris did a fantastic job here, this whole instrument is genius!! I love the xy morphing pad. It's quite random, but that is what makes it fun! You can get some very weird synth sounds from this instrument, but it's also incredibly fun. You can also use the mod wheel to bend the samples in a pretty wild way, and speaking about wild there is also a slider for extreme bit crushing, which is definitely fun to use on top of the xy pad.
This instrument may not be too useful for shaping sounds, because you do not have the most control over what you are going to get, but it's very fun nevertheless. I highly recommend anyone to give this library a try!
Quirky
This goes from a few simple bleeps up to an absolute beast in just the swipe of an XY control. For the size of the download and the brief time it would take to have a little play it's definitely worth grabbing. If you can get that raw, angry side under control then this sample pack could be exactly what you're after.
