This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Jake Hendriksen
Jake Hendriksen’s Reviews
This is remarkable
I love the energy and style here. Having three mic options (plus reverb) and all of these phrases available in such a compact and easily comprehensible interface makes me very happy! There's a lot of music to be discovered in this instrument.
Delightful and Nostalgic, Yet Feels Widely Usable
The Tape Loop is good and gritty, the Coby is lofi, mono, and a little darker, which are less to my taste, but definitely have their uses. The Technics, for me, is instantly pleasant and musical, with a remarkable range of timbres, thanks to the numerous sliders for various "stops" including but not limited to "Cello", "Flute", "Melodia", "Pedal", "Tbone", and "Var. Highs", "Var. Mids". Control over Attack, Tone & Dynamic Range, Reverb and Release, as well as panning of individual "stops" makes this a particularly usable and functional interface, that allows a lot of control and flexibility in getting what you want from the instrument. I would love to see the Mod Wheel mapped to something by default, probably Tone. I feel like I've gotten sounds ranging from "1970's Instructional Safety Video" to "Reed Organ" to "80's synthpop" to bordering on "Cathedral Organ" out of this instrument.
This made me smile
I don't know what exactly I had in mind, but the office in this sound pack ended up feeling much more analog and old-school than I was expecting.
All of these sounds are very musical, but as I played this, I ended up feeling like I was hanging out with Mel Blanc and Carl Stalling, doing foley work on Bugs Bunny cartoons in the 1930s (check out the albums "The Carl Stalling Project" volumes 1 & 2 to get a better idea of what I mean).
The built-in reverb and especially the delay are very welcome and useful.
There's "only" 16 sounds in this instrument, but I got a kick out of every single one.
Surprisingly musical
This is a lot of fun. Certainly more fun than a creaky door has any logical expectation to be!
The instrument is split into three sections. On the far left in lighter red is what I call "the sirens". Without effects, it reminds me a great deal of an air raid siren. Adding in the delay creates a delightful cacophony.
To the far right is the "black" section of notes, that I approach as more of a percussive / found sounds section. There's some great little nuggets in here, and again, the delay turn these sounds into something more musical.
My favorite section by far, though, is the center, darker red from C0 to C2. I would love to find out more about how this was made. While playing single notes, it's an almost synth-sounding chime. Once you start playing multiple notes at once, and particularly triads, the notes begin to scoop and slide up and down, meeting after a moment in a delicious chord. It reminds me of a pedal steel guitar, and I'm not aware of other virtual instruments that behave this way.
Classic Sounds At Your Fingertips
The samples sound great, and are immediately recognizable. The readme file explains the mapping of the samples. There's no UI to speak of, although the background of the instrument is a photo of the CR-78 drum machine itself, which is fun and inspiring.
It does seem that the physical drum machine has more sounds than the samples represented here, but the sounds that are here are good ones!