DROPLETS Review
Droplets is a unique and clever sequencer, I think just by looking at it you can immediately get the idea of what it does. Up top there are faucets which release droplets, these droplets hit bars, a note is played for each collision between a droplet and a bar. This concept has been done before of course, there’s various bouncing ball midi devices out there, like Bitwig’s Ricochet and an early iOS app Musyc, but I really enjoy just how minimal and simple Droplets is. Droplets comes with a built in synth engine and the ability to output midi, so you can use it to control your favorite plugins. As of now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to say presets for your layout, but these will recall if you save your project in the DAW, or create a local preset for your DAW.
The minimal UI is quite lovely, basic lines, nothing overly done, you can set the ripples to be rainbow colored as well. Clicking anywhere creates a bar, you can drag it around of course as well, if you instead right click, it lets you create a bar and rotate/ resize it. Clicking up top lets you create a faucet, and you can set the drip speed with right click or scroll wheel. Two basic concepts are at play in Droplets: larger bars are lower notes and faster droplets have higher velocity. You can also deactivate bars to use them to block notes, which is nice for limiting how often lower notes get triggered.
From here it only gets a bit more complicated, you can set a custom scale, so all notes are in key and you can quantize the timing so notes trigger on beat as well. After that, there’s wind, gravity, and tilt, which give you a bit more control over the physics. Lower gravity means the drops move slower and trigger softer, til rotates everything, and my favorite, wind slowly blows left to right with higher intensity. Wind comes in handy for giving natural variation to the physics, without it, things can end up looping fairly predictably. If you’re crafty, you can automate wind, gravity, and tilt from your DAW, or if your DAW allows it, use external modulation.
As mentioned, Droplets can send midi, but it also includes a built in synthesizer if you just want to keep everything wrapped in one package. This synth engine is dead simple, three oscillators, FM, a sampler, a lowpass filter, and effects. It’s not much, but it works just fine for the concept, the effects are also quite pleasant, a nice reverb, a solid delay, and a sweet modulation effect. I do think the delay would benefit from a ping-pong mode, and maybe I’d like to see a bandpass filter. Changing the FM ratio sounds REALLY nice, I’d love if this could be modulated. Additionally, the LFO is not free running, it retriggers ever note, so you can’t get slow transformations of sound.
One really cool thing about the built in synth engine, is the “spread” control, which pans the notes left or right relative to the position of whichever bar was triggered. I actually wish they’d lean into this concept, allowing X/Y position to be used as modulation, either at the time of triggering, or as the droplet falls afterwards. Additionally, velocity would have been nice as well to control FM depth or filter, but you can do this with external midi anyways. All the wishes aside, what is on offer is already rock solid, or should I say, drop solid?
I plan on using Droplets quite a bit, once you get the right balance of drip speed, gravity, wind and notes going, there’s a pleasant evolution of melodies. It’s the perfect generative sequencing tool. Running it into multi effects or granular engines provides copious experimentation. I particularly enjoyed playing with Droplets into Portal, I believe Other Desert Cities would be another fun effect for this one. While there are things I’d wish for, I don’t think Droplets “needs” any of these features, it’s just the sort of plugin that your imagination runs with. Perhaps different bar types, or faucets that send to different midi channels, the ideas are endless, but how much more can you squeeze in while keeping the idea simple, intuitive, and fun to use.
You can pick up DROPLETS from Finn Mitchell-Anyon’s Gumroad here: https://finneganeganegan.gumroad.com/l/Droplets
There’s also an even more minimal web version: https://fynthesizer.github.io/Drip/