DRUMLOGUE Review

Zzounds has shipped me a Korg Drumlogue. I’ve been eyeing this one for awhile, upon first being leaked I thought it looked pretty, but I’m not a huge fan of the “-logue” line in general. After it was officially announced and I got to see a bit of what’s under the hood, it sparked my interest. Drumlogue is a hybrid analog/digital drum sampler, it has a classic TR style step sequencer, with front panel controls for your main drum controls. Each drum part has additional pages for various settings, and effects sends. There’s not too many pages to dive through, and you get four encoders under a OLED display for easier navigation. There’s not a whole lot to the digital side of things yet, I’m hoping in the future third party engines will come to the drumlogue like they have with the keyboard counterparts.

BUILD:

The build is interesting, it feels like a drum machine, even though it is capable of much more. The main body is plastic, with an aluminum faceplate, and wood side panels. The knobs range from nice normal sized sturdy potentiometers, that have a slick rotational feel, to tiny volca sized knobs, to fairly cheap feeling detented encoders. The buttons are a bit stiff, making it hard to finger drum, and sometimes hard to program. For example, you can’t really slide your fingers across the steps to activate them all, some will, but not all of them. I’d also add the red LED’s are a bit bright for my taste, and the shift functions are a bit too dark. Though the backlit buttons with text are perfect, and look really cool. Sometimes the UI is a bit confusing, the front panel controls aren’t in any of the pages, and I often forget they are even available as I’m digging through the encoder interface. There are also 4 additional outs after L/R, which is really nice, always fun to send individual drums into effects. I’ll be running mine into all 4 Octatrack inputs. 

SOUND ENGINE:

On the analog side, the sounds are pretty limited, the kick and snare are good, but I’m not too fond of the toms, after that it’s almost all samples and digital. I’m not sure if the transients for the kick and snare are samples or not, but the variety of sounds you can get are pretty limited without them. There’s a good amount of internal samples to pick from, including a variety of miscellaneous sounds, you get bit reduction and drive per sample, also start and end time is pretty useful. You can upload your own samples as well, taking Drumlogue a little further if you have a good collection. There’s also a single synth part, which can be VPM a variation of FM, noise, or “user” which currently only has one option. The synth engine leaves a bit to be desired, it’s cool that it’s there, but you don’t get nearly as much control as you’d like, though the VPM engine does sound good. Every part has a simple filter, there’s not envelope for it, but resonance is very capable of creaming boomy subs. I wasn’t huge on the effects, the reverb is ok, and the master effects often don’t provide quite the balance I’m looking for. You can assign samples per step and lock the start/end points, so there’s a fair bit of glitching type sounds you can create, but most of all I’d have liked to see more synth engines like the VPM.

One aspect I almost neglected to mention is the user wave engine. Korg has their “logue” API open to the public, so you can program and code your own oscillators for many of the items in their “logue” line of products. Currently there are only a few options out there, most notably a Braids clone called Lillian. I hope to see more engines added, and honestly, a single voice for this just isn’t enough, it’d be nice to have a whole drum machine based on Braids, or even just 4 drum voices. Either way, this opens up one of the drum channels to some very powerful potential. I might be mistaken on this, but I also believe the SDK can be used to create custom effects as well?

SEQUENCER:

the sequencer is pretty cool, it includes probability, polymeters, the ability to offset notes, there’s also a nifty groove system, providing a variety of different feels. Motion sequencing is a nice addition, nearly every part control can be sequenced, even sample selection, however I did not seem to be able to sequence effects. The sequencing can be recorded in, which is fine for front panel controls, but doesn’t work to well with the encoders, but you can also hold down steps and adjust the parameter depth, this also displays the resulting value for the step, and any other step amounts. It’s not quite the P-locking system from Elektron, but it is pretty close, you . These various features really takes Drumlogue from being a simple drum machine to something close to a generative beat production tool. Especially when you consider the “loop” mode, which turns the steps into an arpeggiator, you can press down various steps, and it will play through only those ones, you can even randomize playback. This mode is really fun to play with to come up with new beats and patterns. Another fun mechanic is the program que mode, which instantly switches between patterns via step buttons, but I don’t believe this is intended to be a performance feature, as it gets pretty clicky and buggy sounding. The trigger conditions are actually pretty cool, you get both probability and recurrence at the same time, so you can have a drum trigger say 50% of the time, but only every third pass. This already leads to quite a bit more variation compared to Elektron’s system, but you also get more patterns to choose from with visual indication of how many cycles it will trigger on. The only downside is that it tops out at 4 cycles unlike Elektron’s 8.

This wont be one I keep, while I had fun with Drumlogue, it just never quite connected with me. I could see it playing a particular role in someone’s music, or even their signature sound, just not mine. It really is a surprisingly capable machine, and hopefully with future updates they can expand on these capabilities. I think the Drumlogue really just leaves me wishing for a new generation of Electribe grooveboxes, Korg have explored so many great Ideas since the last gen, and this just almost scratches that itch.

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