Massive sound, lots of unique tricks, hard-hitting personality, onboard basslines — more people should be talking about the Modor DR-2. And amidst the blizzard of news last month, you might have missed that it now does trig conditions.
OS014 landed at the end of December, so we may have missed it while we were all hibernating, recovering from holidays, processing NAMM and Buchla & Friends news, or some combination. There are a few enhancements in here, in fact, but trig conditions make a nifty headline. Here’s the demo:
And praise be to Modor, there’s now an autosave. Yeah, this was maddeningly left off earlier firmwares, and it’s important, because tiny dial tweaks can suddenly put you in new sonic territory — it’s a big part of the appeal.
And you can load and save single instruments. And there’s an ALL STOP and a MUTE. Even before we get to trig conditions, this irons out a lot of the issues that made this beast a little too brutish sometimes.
But you also get a nice combination of trig conditions, and they’re implemented in a very Modor-ish way. (Well, Toto, we’re not in Sweden, we’re in Belgium.)
Hold a step button and turn SELECT/BPM to dial in your functions. From the documentation:
- A:B condition: true every Ath time of B repeats. 3:4 means the drum hit is played the 3rd of every 4 loops of the pattern.
- N% condition: random triggering with N% chance to be true.
- PREV A-F condition: true if the previous evaluation on instrument A…F was true.
- PLAY condition: true while the PLAY button is held down.
- NOT [turn to the left]: inverts the evaluation of the trig condition. If an exclamation mark (!) shows up, the condition outcome is inverted. !3:4 means that the drum hit will play every time except the 3rd of every 4 loops.
That “NOT” condition may actually be the most useful function of this, musically.
When I say tricks, I mean stuff like this — check this beta-kick drum voice minus the pitch enveope:
In a way, it’s too bad that the whole publicity cycle is right when a device is new, as a series of firmware updates has really refined the DR-2 into a more complete instrument. (I edited Keyboard Magazine‘s original review of the MPC60, and Roger Linn himself was literally mailing floppy disks with updated firmware to the magazine. Yes, in the postal mail.) I love that process, because it evolves out of user feedback and the creator getting time to tinker with ideas in more depth.
But yes, the DR-2 deserves to be mentioned alongside entries from Erica Synths, Roland, Elektron, and others. And that pricetag is significantly lower than a TR-1000, too — for something that is really unique. (I love the Roland piece, but — there’s also something to be said for having the thing other folks don’t have.)
https://www.modormusic.com/dr2.html
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Oh, and North American buyers, Perfect Circuit has a sale on a demo unit, if you’re quick:
DR-2 Digital Drum Machine [Demo] @ Perfect Circuit
Previously: