 Hello OscillatorSync here and this is the long-awaited drum log from Korg. I'm fully aware that this is a release day video so it's probably coming out at the same time as quite a few other videos on the subject of the drum log so I'm going to try and stay in my lane and not tread on the toes of my colleagues and friends. On YouTube, a similar plan for this video is to start off with a quick fire FAQ going through all of the features all of the things you're likely to want to know about the drum log and then for the rest of the video we're going to make some beats to get a feel for the workflow and to get a feel of course for the sounds as well. Before we get started with that though in the interest of transparency Korg did send the drum log over to me early to make some videos about but they have not asked for nor have they been given any editorial oversight as to the content of said videos so without further ado let's talk about the drum log. Now I know I'm not a YouTuber known for his brevity but let's see how quickly we can get through this so here comes the big info dump. Let's start by talking about the sound sources here so the drum log is a hybrid drum machine so it has a combination of analog and digital aspects to it the first four parts here the bass drum snare and toms are the analog parts they at the core of them we have analog sound generation which is going to customize to the jobs that we have there on top of the analog part there's also the ability to mix in a pcm transient sample to go at the start of the sound which can help you customize the attack of that sound. Next up there are six sample parts now they're labeled as closed hi hats open hi hat rim shot clap and then to user samples but you can actually assign whatever you want to each of those different parts now the good news is that these are stereo samples I've loaded in a synth hit which obviously pans from left to right and you'll be able to hear it is indeed a stereo sample there. Alluding to what just happened there of course I have loaded in my own user samples so that is something that you can do as well and those of you who have maybe struggled in the past with some core librarian software or the way that for example the opposite has to connect to the librarian software you'll be very very happy to hear that there is no librarian software involved in this you simply start up the drum log with I think the record button held down it turns up on your computer as a usb drive and you can drag the samples straight on the only thing you need to do is name the samples appropriately they have to start with a three digit number but other than that you drag them on you dismount the drive and it just works which is fantastic. Now I will just quickly mention one little grumble about the samples in terms of the way that this current version of the firmware works so on this channel here I've got kind of this string sample going on here and if I set its decay to the absolute longest that's kind of all we get now that sample is like three four seconds long so obviously the decay is not long enough to play the entire sample and there's no way currently to kind of hold the decay open until the end of the sample even if in the parameters you set the start and end to zero and a hundred percent so that's a bit of a limitation at the moment to my knowledge corg are aware that people think this is a limitation so hopefully in a further firmware update we'll be able to hold the samples open for a little bit longer the final part here is the multi-engine which comes pre-loaded with a vpm which is corg's kind of take on FM the variable phase modulation there's a digital noise source which is very flexible with filtering and saturation and bit crushing and the like and then finally there's a user multi-engine which is making use of that kind of log SDK that we've seen on the NTS1 the Millog XD and the Prolog so hopefully once the drumlog has been released people will start making user oscillators to load into this particular slot here which will be really good news it comes pre-loaded with a kind of virtual analog sound made from maybe sound vibes I believe to be clear you can't have the phase modulation the noise and the user algorithms all working at once there is a single multi-channel here it just happens that you select what you're doing with it with these three buttons so there's only one channel there you can see from the front panel that we have quite a lot of hands on control over the parameters of the different parts here we have volumes all across the top and then a selection of parameters for each of the channels in this matrix of knobs here but on each of the channels we can also go into some menus here to get more in-depth control over the sounds and how they're rooted and that kind of thing in terms of effects we have send effects for delay and reverb there's some delay and there's some reverb we also have a master effects section which comes loaded with effects like EQ compressor filter there's a really good sounding saturator on there as well you can only load one of these master effects at once you do have to pick the one that you want to use for a particular beat but importantly each of the parts that we have here can bypass that master effects so for example if you want to use the compressor with sidechain you can sidechain the bass drum and then have the bass drum bypass the master effects so that it is not getting squashed by the compression which is really really useful good thinking there cork the other thing is that the effects here are also making use of the kind of log SDK that we've seen on the NTS1 and the Minlog XD which means that hopefully a number of the user created and third party effects that are out there already will be compatible with the drumlog so there's going to be hopefully a whole bunch of different reverbs delays and other master effects like filters and choruses and whatever else that we will have available to us pretty soon I would hope there is also an audio input which can be routed through the effects just a separate jack on the back here the sad thing about that is that it's not a sequenceable track so you might remember on the electrives for example they had an audio input which you could then like gates with the sequencer which is a really really nice thing to be able to do to create sort of rhythms within there that's not currently possible on this version of the firmware anyway I've kind of touched on this already but I think it's worth repeating the drumlog is a stereo unit so each of the different channels have panning they also have this kind of spread which is just like a delay offset effect on most of them the samples are in stereo and the effects are in stereo this is a stereo unit in almost every regard let's talk a little bit about IO there's a main left and right output on the back as well as a headphones output excitingly for a lot of people I'm sure there are four assignable outputs on the back as well so you can send you can only send one track each to each of those outputs and when you do and you plug that output in it will be removed from the main BS we have assignable outputs so if you need to process a kick separately or your samples separately that is something that you can do hooray there is MIDI on the back with proper five pin din I'm no snob when it comes to TRS mini jack MIDI but okay no I kind of I kind of am and I'm really glad to see full-size MIDI connections on the back sadly there's no MIDI through however there's only MIDI in and a MIDI out so in terms of integrating this into a wider a wider setup either this needs to be at the start or the end of a chain of clock basically it's not the end of the world or you get a three box I suppose but it's worth bearing in mind if you're looking to integrate this into your setup it's also an analog sync there so you can use this to clock or be clocked from for example the volkers or other analog gear modular gear or whatever it needs to be and as kind of previously mentioned there is an audio input as well we also have two USB connections on the back there's the standard kind of connection that you would expect to have there to connect the drumlog to your computer this will not pass audio unfortunately it doesn't act as an audio interface it passes MIDI and it's also used for sample management and firmware updates and the like the second connection on the other hand rather excitingly is a connection that will allow the drumlog to act as a USB MIDI host so you can plug in a USB only MIDI controller or for example an iPad and control the drumlog that way so for example here I've got the nano control two here plugged in it's just USB it hasn't got any power it's been powered by the drumlog as well and I've got it set up to be able to control some of the channels and in this case give me control over panning because that's not something that's on the front panel it's got volume there so you can get control of stuff via USB and the MIDI implementation is pretty complete there are some parameters that currently are not represented as MIDI CC control which I would like to see so things like there's a filter per part that's not currently MIDI controllable I'd love to see that MIDI controllable cork if you're listening please on the home straight here let's talk about the sequencer quickly it is a 64 step sequencer the length is assignable per part as is the rate and indeed whether or not it's working in triplets so you can do all those polymeter tricks that I personally like a lot there is probability and per cycle step conditions so you can set it so that a particular step will only fire 50 percent of the time or you can set it so that that step hits every third time that the cycle goes round if you are familiar with the electron workflow that will sound pretty familiar to you I think it's safe to say that cork are at least aware of electron so that functionality is there which is great especially for someone who is an electron fanboy like me there's velocity per step and that velocity can play into the synthesis on the analog channels in terms of the sweep amounts and and the like we've also got ratchets or repeats so you can do those lovely trills you can also set those to ratchet up ratchet down or stay even as they ratchet that's really really cool great for adding complexity to your sounds we'll be playing with that very shortly something that was surprising but very very gratifying to discover when I first started playing with the drum log is that every single parameter can be motion sequenced and I don't just mean the ones that are controllable by the knobs here as you go into the menu those parameters can be motion sequenced as well and you can record those live or you can set them by step by holding down a step again if you're familiar with the electron workflow that will be very comfortable for you even the sample slot on the sample parts can also be sequenced per step which is pretty exciting we also have a looper if you've played with any cork sequences previously you'll be familiar with the idea of holding down a few steps and having those loop we have it on the volkers we have it on the sq1 and the sq64 it's a really nice performance tool in order to create roles fills variations breakdowns that kind of thing and you have control over how those steps are going to be played back whether they're going to be played back in sequence or random finally we have pattern chaining you can chain up to 16 patterns but there's no sort of full song mode on drum lock hopefully that's everything you could possibly want to know let me know in the comments if you have any other questions it is definitely definitely time to start playing with some sounds i think right then let's make a beat so i have initialized the pattern and i'm currently in live mode which allows me to play everything live as it were and allows me to select a particular part if you want to select a part without playing it we can hold down the part button here and select it without it making a sound which is great if you are in the middle of a jam you need to adjust the parameters on the go let's set our bpm to 130 let's turn the bass drum up nice and loud and let's lay down a a bass drum let's just go forward to the floor let's keep it simple for the for the moment so i'm going to go to step mode here i've got the bass drum selected and i'll just pop down my four to the floor there there we go good stuff so let's um let's craft this sound a little bit more um so on the front panel we have controls for tune decay nice boominess and we also have drive here and a little goes a long way get pretty nasty at the top end there cool um let's um take a look at the extended parameters here a little bit so um we've got this idea of the transient on the front end here and we can select different transients uh so um if i just cycle through them you'll hear how it affects the sound and so on quite a few here i like the bell accent one and the fork one yeah um now you can adjust the amount of attack we're hearing here so if we turn the attack here down to um zero percent we're just hearing the analog sound here and we can adjust the sweep amount and the sweep time make a freak tight there and we also have this hold here which holds the kick drum open for a little while but we can turn this down if we want to get more of a a tacky kind of sound even with a longer decay we'll put on a little bit of hold and maybe go back to one of the more conventional transients there cool um we also have on most of the parts a filter that we can apply here um you can either have it turned off where it says through we can high pass it in one direction and low pass it in the other direction maybe give it some uh filtering with some resonance to get that kind of attack at the cutoff the resonance incidentally will self oscillate which is kind of cool because you can really get a lot of character into the sound something like that I think uh so let's put a couple of incidental hits in there as well like uh one of those perhaps but we probably don't want this one to hit every single time so um actually first of all we probably don't want it to be as loud as the other ones either so if we come into the accent page here we can change the level for each of the steps so we can cycle through the accents like this but you can also hold down and set the accent amount or the velocity if you like uh manually as well so let's maybe accent each of these so they're full velocity and we probably don't want this particular hit to happen every single time either so let's come into the step here and we can hold down here this is where we have control over our uh our trigger conditions if you like so we can adjust the probability if you want like that but I think probably with this kind of sound we probably want to set it to happen on the fourth of four on two three like that and we also have the ability here to offset our hits so if you want to make this one a little bit later sort of humanize it a little bit don't think it sounds good though um so we'll keep that sort of bang on there maybe also have one here uh but again maybe we don't want this to happen um very often so we can maybe just use probability for that one cool we've got a bit of a kick drum happening let's move over to our snare and we'll just keep things simple to begin with and we'll just pop some stuff down on your five and thirteen again this is just the default sound so on the front panel do we have control over we have control over the attack of the body of the sound it's going over here ringing there a bunch of snappier there we have control over the tuning of the ringing and we have control over the decay of the noise element if we come into the controls here we can change the type of noise we have here so here we have the eighth model there's the nine model you might be able to read between the lines and work out what they're talking about there and we also have white noise red noise pink noise blue noise and a couple of lo-fi noises as well quite like that one inside here we can also control the level of the snap so if we want to take it out all together can and we also got this tone control which adjusts the adjusts the detuning between the two oscillators here to get kind of different body sounds and we then have our filter here as well let's just make it a bit darker get some resonance and we'll turn down that decay a bit so that's where you get some ratcheting going in here as well so we can have like a so at the moment we've got a single hit here which doesn't sound super interesting but if we come into the accents this is where we can set our ratchets so we can hold down this step have it ramp up and we probably also want to have that snap a little less longer there because we're kind of missing some of that sort of ramp up so we can come into motion here and we can motion sequence on a particular step if we want to so we're on step 10 here so we can hold this down and we can maybe turn the snappy down we probably also don't want this to happen every single time so we'll come into the step here and we'll set our probability down maybe like 30 something percent we can have that one at the end there as well maybe we'll set that one to a low probability as well and we probably also want to lower its velocity so we can also start thinking about sending stuff to our effects so maybe we'll send our snare to our delay a bit maybe the reverb that's a very big reverb so let's just save this quickly into one of the hit part here so that reverb is pretty big at the moment so the reverb delay and master effects kind of are tracks in themselves so if we select the reverb part here we can change the reverb parameter a little bit so let's uh those are all going the wrong way though let's go to a room once it's a bit shorter don't want a big big one for this one okay okay what next so next up i think i want to add in some tom sounds but i want to kind of give it that kind of techno poly meter kind of vibe going on like maybe only one or two steps per pattern but have those patterns different lengths to the kind of four four that's going on at the moment so let's go over to our low tom first of all so to set this up to work with poly meters we want to make sure that these tracks are selected to work that way so we can hit shift and 11 here it's just says poly just on here we've just turned on shift hold there if you hold down shift for a period of time i'll disable it now okay if you hold down shift for a period of time it turns on shift hold which means you don't have to keep holding down shift with your other hand to adjust parameters that require the shift or to fire things off on here be aware however that if you accidentally turn shift hold on and then hit for example step 16 you're going to in it your track now what's really important to realize is that if you hit it again it undoes that in it or undoes that's clear so i didn't realize that's beginning with and i lost a grid pattern earlier when i was playing with this so yep just a little tip there you tap it again to turn that off so we want to come into the poly here and what we now can do is select parts that we want to be poly metric so to begin with it's going to be just those two there the high and low tom so we're on the low tom here and to set the length of this particular part we hold down part and we tap time and that gets you into the part time if you don't hold down part you just get the global time here so they're the master length of the tracks which is currently 16 so yeah if i hold down part hit that i can now set the length of this part pattern rather than the whole pattern so let's maybe set it to like 13 i'll just choose that arbitrarily and i'll just come into that mode and just pop down a step so let's have a listen to how that now sounds so you've kind of got that kind of phasing sound going on there which is cool let's pan that somewhere so we'll come into its parameters here and if we come through to the mix and root page let's pan that off to the left a little bit so it doesn't get lost underneath the kick just mute our snare for a second right so in terms of the sound we're going here i want to go for something that's quite sort of clicky so quite short maybe in the settings here we have control over the attack again we have a click that we can layer in here let's maybe take the attack out and maybe try and just do it with the analog sound on its own we have on here control for the detune of this sound which is going to there's two oscillators going on here we can detune them and we can also tune the overall sound and let's maybe use the the resonant filter here to give us some character as well get that resonance up and it's going to ring a little bit oh yeah i've also got a drive here see how that sounds could be cool i think i'll leave it off so we get more of that attack nice and let's do a similar thing with our hi tom as well so let's start by setting its length here to something different again so maybe like 11 or something and we'll just pop down a step okay let's pan that off to the side a little bit let's turn its decay down a bit so it's not ringing a bit much maybe let's do that same trick with the resonant filter give it some sort of length by pinging the filter let's maybe put a ratchet for this one as well so maybe you come over here set a ratchet for this one a bit quieter and maybe not every time there that right that probability put the snare back in a bit too much uh reverb on that snare probably let's just take that down a little bit maybe get some delay on that higher tom so at the moment the delay is uh kind of working in mono i think set it to uh some dotted eights and set it to ping pong put a filter in there cool this is starting to feel pretty interesting let's see what else we can do i think this will be an opportune moment to take a look at the master effects a little bit so let's come into the master channel here so we can select through a number of different uh effect types including bypass so we have a compressor we have a filter we have what's called the boost which is my favorite this is probably one i'm going to end up using and we also have this eq 3 which is a three band eq so let's just set that little pattern going again so here's the eq 3 so we have you know a three band eq and on the second page here we can change where the uh kind of the the crossovers for the eqs happen so we're on lowest lows to be lower and the highs to be higher we can certainly do that so you've got eq there which is master eq and again we can bypass the master effects if we don't want any particular part to go in there so if we come into a particular part so we didn't want the kick drum to go through here we could come through to this page and we can say master uh bypass you can hear that kick drums bottom end is going to drop down now and it's going back through um so that's the eq 3 which is nice sounds kind of lame without it now doesn't it so we have a compressor uh like uh that um so um that's compressing everything all at once as i mentioned we can do sidechaining so if i turn the sidechain on here um at the moment the sidechain isn't getting anything so not sending anything into the sidechain so the way we'd probably want to set this up would be to come into your bass drum part here and if we come into uh the mix and rooting page here um so um the first thing we're going to want to do is turn up the sidechain amount for the kick drum so they can hear that that compressor's really hitting down on everything but we can um turn the kick drum uh to rather take the kick drum out of the master and now our kick drum is sidechaining um everything else i'm particularly set up the um we can certainly sidechain against the kick drum for example uh let me just put um this back to where it was let's turn the sidechain down so the next effect that we have in here uh is uh the filter so this is a master filter across the whole mix unless you take stuff out of course um so again this might be a situation where you want to take the uh the kick drum out or uh you want to take the snare out or whatever happens to be but we have uh basically a bunch of different um filter types here low pass filters band pass filters high pass filters and the like we can of course change the cutoffs the resonance this one doesn't resonate quite as hard uh this um cutoff uh is actually controllable by an external controller so this is a situation where you could sort of set up a dj filter kind of set up um and have that on a slider including switching to the mode which isn't um filtering anything so that's pretty neat uh the final one however is the final one yeah the final one which is my favorite which is this boost one and so this is kind of like a um saturator with a filter built in um i'll show you what i mean so so we've started to get some nice boost and saturation there but then we have this centering width control which is essentially like a eq control with a q and we can sort of center the um distortion around a different area wider the width the more it's going to get distorted and this is such a great way to get dirty viby sounds especially love it sort of you can hear that the reverb is going through the the master but you can i believe if you wanted to yeah send it post the master if you wanted to and just like dirty stuff so you don't have to be quite as extreme as that if you don't want to of course but yeah that's my favorite i have to admit so i'm probably gonna stick with that one right a couple of things that now we've got to this sort of mastering uh stage that i want to adjust before we start bringing some of the other parts so the first thing is um i uh think that my snare is currently a bit too um bit too bright with everything else now we've got a bit sort of grungy and and lo-fi so i think we're going to just come into its parameters here and just bring that cutoff down a bit might try a different reverb sound as well okay that's cool right let's get that offbeat simple thing going on there so let's um it's still too much reverb isn't it so let's come over to let's get that that offbeat hi-hat in there we can record this one live i guess so let's hit the record button bring and i'm not sure about that sample so let's choose a different sample uh so uh so we have samples which are arranged in uh banks and then we can choose the sample from there like a tambourine do you like a tambourine so we have control over the tuning of all our samples we can also change the start and end points for the samples uh we have our filter the same way we have with with our other channels still can be set to kind of resonate groovy and we then have a bit reduction if we wanted i don't think it's appropriate on this one and a drive doesn't need it not this time it's a panic bit so we also have this spread control here which creates like a stereo delay between the two which can kind of give you that stereo widening without sort of um doing anything else which is which is neat um don't think we need it for this sound i'll do it i don't know that's kind of cool with just a little bit of it and let me kind of just turn it down a bit just a tiny bit and then we'll have like a poly metric thing with the uh with the close actual that thing going on yeah let's try that let's just save this quickly save the kids yeah so let's uh go into our poly meter let's put our closed high hat in the poly meter pool come over to our closed high hat and let's set its length to uh seven i think is what is in my head and come into the steps here that's exactly what i had in my head perfect great um a little bit as well so we're going to our accent here and just sort of have these uh ramp up a little bit each time come back into the steps to set the probabilities that to be pretty low what do we need to do about the sound here don't we need to maybe darken it a tiny bit bring the resonance up to emphasize the cutoff uh we could also choose a different um uh sample of course let's play with the uh loop a little bit now that we've kind of got into this kind of so with the uh loop mode we're going to loop mode and we hold down a number of steps and they're just going to loop round and round around the way it's set up currently with the resume set to be synced it's always going to start back in the right place so we're not going to like um mess up the groove and this can be as simple as just holding down a single um step you'll notice there that our probability is still in play when we're holding down a single step we also change the speed that we loop round cool uh all make it faster or much faster that could fun um we can also change it uh to be random rather than uh looping round forward which is going to give you kind of different effects depending on what the the beat is and we can also set this to um actually um when you take the last one out it goes back to playing back um i personally prefer it in momentary okay um let's maybe put some uh samples down so let's pop a sample down um so if i come over to this sample track here and we can choose let's i'll grab one of my samples perhaps uh maybe just that uh a little yeah let's just grab that panning synth it's got some nice stereo movement built into it uh which is good uh so let's uh get that playing maybe let's um just mute a couple of maybe just something like that hit record yeah that's something in it um so let's have a look at how we can mess with the sample a little bit so we have um controls for the attack and decay probably for the by the nature of this sample we probably want to keep things pretty open um we then have our um standard sort of filtering stuff here as well and let's see what we can do here um let's try the redux hello there's something something good there so the cutoff is before the drive so you can't really take the high end of the drive so we might just have to compensate with some volume there instead of character not so much there's so much a bit reduction there can't really get anything done there but that's okay probably want to get some of that in the reverb on step 12 we've got this uh second step we want a motion sequence the tuning of that to get that other note happening so unfortunately we're going to be uh tuning um just based on tuning um we'll just have to get it to the right point that's what we wanted we don't want that every single time we probably want that every so we can come into the alternative alternating one here i want to get a bit of chaos into this with the uh other sample perhaps um so we come back into live mode here and we've got um sample going on in there at the moment something like that might be fun cool uh so that kind of pattern yeah okay uh so let's come into the motion control um 9 12 and 15 you want to change the sample slot on so to do that we come into the motion here and we just make sure that we're on the right uh set up here for what we want to uh parameter lock and we can just hold down and we can also set the tuning on a per step as well uh before we don't want that every single time do we so we want to come into the steps here and maybe set these again to like just on the sorry i'm incredibly for some reason very very tickled by that let's give that uh some shape a little bit you've got to remember that filter plus resonance you can actually be used to boost the ion as well as cut it so again uh to do the panning we just need to make sure we're in the right page here which is this one and then we can just come into the motion sequencing and maybe we want like loads of reverb on the art here so we've got filters we sorry we've got samples we've got the analog let's take a look at the multi-engine just to finish this off so as i mentioned towards the beginning of the video and we have this multi section here which allows us to choose between a couple of different um oscillator types if you like um we can only have one of these active at once so let's take a listen to what kind of sounds we get from the multi-engine so this is the vpm which is kind of the fm side of things now the multi section for the vpm and the user is the only section where we actually talk about notes so we can sort of program in particular notes when we motion sequence rather than just try and deal with the tuning which is pretty interesting so here we have basically a little two op fm synth so ratio is the ratio between the two operators indexes the modulation amount like so and then noise allows us to um noise modulates the operator as well so we can kind of noisy hits in here as well if we mix that in with like a higher ratio we get some pretty intense sounds there we then have a an envelope which we can then use to modulate the index or the operator mount so maybe if i bring this down a little bit and we turn the index mod up we can hear we can kind of get that cool kind of hit sound you can want it in as well if we turn up the attack and that's basically it in terms of the controls you've got here but it's actually quite a nice way to get a range of kind of especially percussive fme sounds we can also change the eg amount to actually hold things we can also set the eg to gate which means that we can have it affect the index but not the volume uh i like it as a are they to get those kind of knocks and cracks can get those nice fm tom sounds what's missing uh for me from this is that there's no way to detune um the other operators so you can't get this really metallic sound so easily you can kind of get them by going with the other higher ratio amounts but still it would be great to be able to get more sort of metallic sounds and then after that we have our normal controls for sending it to the reverb and the like so that's the vpm it's a nice thing to have i quite like it for percussive sounds although you can as i say use it to sequence it like a scent so the next one along here is the noise which is a digital noise source which has a filter built in or a decimator built in so for example we go to the bandpass here got the color control which allows us to adjust the cutoff we have the peak which is our resonance here without having to attack and release here which just affects the volume not the cutoff but it's good for getting those kind of windy hits and we could motion sequence the color here to get pictures in as well and we also got the decimator here which gives you kind of that decimated sound and the color here reduces the bit depth instead sample rate even good stuff so the last mode here is the user by default that gives us nothing because we haven't loaded a user oscillator it comes from the factory with this one called nano which is kind of a virtual analog type thing so we can use it to create baselines or lead lines or whatever we want to do when we come to the user oscillators here whatever is presented here is going to be per oscillator essentially so in this case we've got a way to choose which waves we're using the dg between them the balance between them yep we've got a filter with key tracking and resonance of course different filter modes there and then we have control over the the envelope generator where we wanted to have an attack or not and what it's going to control and then we also have an LFO here as well so it kind of got like a kind of a pretty comprehensive sort of comprehensive basic virtual analog setup here which is a really nice thing to have so we can set up a something like that and we could lay that in with our beat perhaps so so we could come into our motion sequencing here so the user the multi engines I should say are the only ones which will allow you to create sustained notes instead so if we have a look here in the step here we have a length here which you don't have any other ones personally I think there should be a length for the samples as well but so it goes so we can choose now to set the notes to these else we're going to change the probability of some of these as well so I think this one's probably a every other and this one's every fourth again now of course we could do this with longer pattern lengths but I'm so invested in the electron way of working that I ended up doing it was a little it was a mistake but I like it so we're going to build up getting off like a full groove here with various different parts let's go back into that master and see what else we can just do in terms of dirty things up a little bit and of course we can sort of bring things in and out with our mutes as well just so we haven't got our toms in anymore and yeah it's it's just a good fun performable drum machine it very much sits within the ethos of the of the logs here as I think it's a nice addition I don't tend to do reviews on this channel and and this is very much a demo not a review but I think it probably is worth just talking a little bit about what I think is good about the drumlock and where it sits within the pantheon of other modern drum machines the first thing I'll say is that it really feels like the drumlock has a particular character to it I have a particular preference towards sort of slightly more gritty dirty lo-fi sounds anyway and it feels like the drumlock likes those kinds of sounds as well that's not to say that it's it can't sound more refined like I intentionally went for a more gritty sound with this particular beat that we've built today but that is kind of the way that a lot of what I'm doing with the drumlock kind of goes the way that the filters respond the way that the master effects especially the boost master effect which is my favorite kind of responds it does feel like it moves you towards this sort of dirtier kind of sounds obviously you can load any sample you want into the samples but yeah it kind of just have that character and I like instruments with a particular character I think that's a valuable thing most of the stuff that I particularly like has a character to it whether that's in the way that you perform it or with the sounds the ethos behind the drumlock definitely feels like it is designed to be a drum machine and not a a groove box of sorts even though in this particular jam we kind of got some other aspects in there to make it kind of sound a bit more sort of full track jammy kind of thing going on but some of the limitations around the way that you can play in notes for example or rather the fact that you can't really play in notes and you have to motion sequence them the limitations around the way that these samples maximum decay means that we can't sort of do sort of longer samples on loops this is not a box which like if we compare to the flexibility of say the the dig attack or the syntax you're not going to necessarily be creating whole drone pieces on the drumlock which is something I have done on those devices I can conceive of ways that you could get interesting draining characteristics with the resonating filters and the like but it's kind of it's a little bit more pared down in terms of the surface that you have to play with in terms of that side of pushing its boundaries that's not a bad thing per se because it leads to it being a more focused device but I think it's worth making that comparison one thing I do really miss on the drumlock when comparing it to something like the dig attack or the syntax is an LFO or a couple of LFOs a lot of times I kind of wanted to reach for an LFO to automatically sweep certain parameters whether it's the decay or the tuning or the filter or whatever even the the volume and personally coming from that electron world I found that occasionally a little bit limiting of course you can motion sequence those kind of LFO curves and perhaps that's more the way you should approach it especially given that you could essentially if you were willing to motion sequence all the parameters you wanted to be controlling many many more parameters then would be possible on those electron boxes so it's kind of limited in one way but more flexible in another in that regard but it was just something coming from that world of being an electron fanboy that I particularly noticed now that might feel like I'm saying that the drumlock generally is less flexible or capable than than my two beloved electrons but there are some definite advantages that the drumlock has over those firstly and I think the key thing here is that this has synthesis and samples in one box that's a big difference between the drumlock and the electron boxes another massive difference of course is that we have the individual outs on the drumlock and although I wasn't using them in this jam you certainly can I would also say that the side chaining on the drumlock works better than the side chaining on the dig attack as well if I'm being completely honest you also of course have a much wider range of a potential effect the dig attack and syntax delay and reverb are good sounding delays and reverbs but you are stuck with those particular algorithms whereas on the drumlock even out of the box you have multiple different reverb types you didn't really touch on them so so much in this jam but we have like the the shimmery verse we have the octave down reverbs and all that kind of thing and then you also have the multi-engine where you can load in many different types of oscillators and sound design tools and hopefully as this is released into the wild people will be building those oscillators which kind of puts it in the same sort of ballpark as the syntax with its machines I guess although of course you can only have one of them loaded at a time on the drumlock I think fundamentally though the drumlock just sits in really well with the other log devices that Korg have brought out those devices have always been about fun and focus for me the mini log remains one of my sort of favorite polysense despite its limitations and despite some people's qualms about its sound it has a character it's very focused to get to the results that you want and the drumlock kind of maintains that way of working there's a little bit of menu diving which can be occasionally a little bit distracting but once you get into that workflow like with most things once you get into that workflow it's pretty quick to move around all in all I've enjoyed my time with the drumlock and I will I think continue to use it as an alternative to my electron boxes when I need something that is a little bit more focused or just with a bit more of the character the drumlock has if I want that character that kind of more sort of dirty gritty character that it does so well I think you know I'll reach for the drumlock rather than trying to replicate that character on another device so yeah it's not a flawless device as it stands but with a few firmware updates and Korg have been good at supporting the log range and there have since in general over the last couple of years I think with a couple of firmware updates in the next sort of 12 months I think the drumlock could be even more interesting and become potentially quite a special device anyway I hope you enjoyed this dive into the drumlock if you did enjoy the video found it interesting and useful then as always if you could leave a like and hit that subscribe button that's always really really appreciated but otherwise until next time take care bye