At attention! Unfiltered Audio has taken their deep drum synth and favorite effects and remade them as VCV Rack modules. This is instabuy territory ($10-20 a la carte or an intro pricing of $30 for the set, compatible with the free Rack).
I always adored Battalion. From its rich and nerdy set of drum synth methods to its leftfield Shatter Delay and Headspace Reverb, it sounds like nothing else. It’s an engine with personality and a point of view, proof that we can make drum machines that explore strange new worlds. But to be honest, the only thing that brought me back to earth was having yet another Big Plug-in UI.
Unfiltered Audio in VCV Rack, on the other hand, takes that amazing sound engine and opens it up to the total freedom of using Rack’s sequencing and modulation. Or, if you want to stick with your DAW’s sequencing, you could use the paid VCV Rack Pro as a plug-in and just treat this as a sound design and modulation toybox.
And that changes everything. Battalion is a powerful integrated environment with excellent presets; don’t get me wrong. But it’s liberating being able to patch directly into the engine itself. It’s going from the experience of a nice sports car to getting greasy in the pit and hot-rodding your grooves.
They’ve kept this to a neatly organized set of modules:
- Drum Synth
- Shatter Delay (stereo delay with ping-pong, ducking, tilt EQ, sample-rate reduction, syncable)
- Headspace Reverb (multimode reverb with predelay, EQ, sample-rate reduction)
- Tone (multimode distortion and multimode filter with switchable internal routing)
- Output (maximizer, 3-band EQ, gain, multimode clipper)
It may not be immediately obvious just how much the folks at Unfiltered Audio have brought to the Rack environment, because the Drum Synth, Headspace Reverb, and Tone modules each have multiple modes.
Basically, and the reason this excites me, you get to build Battalion yourself. Whatever envelopes you want, modulation you want, sequencing you want — it’s yours.
Drum Synth: Kick, Hi-Hat, Snare, Clap, Modal Bar, Cowbell, FM, Additive, Chaos, VOSIM, SumSyn, Resonator, Comb Sine, Comb Noise, Pillow, Zap, Radiator, LPG, Terrain, Shame, Entangled, Haywire, Tripwire, Construction, Scrapyard
Headspace Reverb: Dark, Rusty, SATREV, Glitter, Bokeh, Flare, Flutter, Hollow, Austere
Tone – Distortion Modes: Bitcrush, Rate Crush, Wavefold, Phase, Tape, Tube, MiniGlitch, MegaGlitch, Contrast, Square, Dropout
Tone – Filter Modes: Scream LP / HP / BP, Dark LP / HP / BP, Comb FB+ / FB- / FF+ / AP
I could explain some of those mode names, but that almost kills the fun of it.
I found Output a little disappointing on its own, just in that I have other modules that do the task better. But it’s easy to justify buying at least Shatter Delay or Headspace Reverb or Drum Synth, and the $30 intro price for the set is a steal.
The UI is a little barebones. There are various color themes for the screen:
But every parameter has CV control with its own attenuator, plus convenient on-panel controls. Also crucial — and part of the reason the effects have an edge on a lot of other modules — is you get a choke input for the reverb and ducking input into the delay.
The Drum Synth module also crucially has velocity, choke, and 1v/oct inputs and an envelope output, in addition to all those copious CV ins.
Honestly, the only downside here is this may start to make you dream of a dedicated hardware module version of Battalion. Word is that they are bringing it to MetaModule from 4ms.
Here’s a stupid intro patch just to get it going.
To generate some patterns, I’m using Valley Topograph — a nicely polished take on the original Mutable Instruments Grids module. (You can see/hear some of the influence of Émilie Gillet and Mutable Instruments throughout Battalion, too, even if it doesn’t use any Mutable code or oscillators directly!) Keeping in the Mutable milieu, I’ve got the direct port Audible Instruments Tidal Modulator 2 as a modulation source, though the fun of this is using any number of modulation modules! And NANO Modules ST MAR is a convenient stereo mixer that doesn’t take up much space. (That one’s a hardware clone! Hmmm… I might… )
Right as I was writing this, I noticed Unfiltered bumped the version to 2.0.1, so quick note: that’s 2.0 in the screenshots.
All of this said, if even $30 is too much, a ton of new stuff just dropped on the VCV Rack library that’s completely free and I need to give that a try, too. Of course… then those new drum modules you could route into Shatter Delay or Headspace Reverb. Ah, it’s a good time to be a VCV Rack user, more and more.
Unfiltered Audio Battalion on VCV Rack
And this comes hot on the heels of the effects being released for free: