Audio.Computer Beat Friend

Much like a real drummer, the Beat Friend is a semi‑autonomous rhythm machine that could bring a life of its own to your music.

Right, stop playing with the thing and write the damn review. It’s not often I have to tell myself that, but the need arose more than once while stress‑testing the Beat Friend from new British developers Audio.Computer (their website address is the very same). It’s simply too much fun to get much else done. A curious little box, the Beat Friend is a drum machine in all but the purest sense of the term, and in parallel to this is described by its creators as a “benevolent, semi‑autonomous” machine; one that “will do its own thing, but is happy to take suggestions” but “can sometimes get carried away”. Indeed, its box carries the words “here to help”. Oo‑err. In this age of AI demagogues, my reflex is to eschew anything that comes with such a caveat, but happily what goes on here couldn’t be further removed from any such creativity‑killing dystopia, for reasons that will become clear.

Friendly Beats

In both sound and style, the Beat Friend is based to a notable degree on the Roland CR‑78; visually it takes more than a few cues from the 1970s school of design (the CompuRhythm CR‑78 was named after its year of release), with a pleasantly nostalgic rounded typeface and more or less the same white‑and‑orange‑on‑black colour scheme as its inspiration. It even presents a pair of nostalgic white soft keys for buttons. Its analogue voice architecture also takes its cues from the CR‑78’s twin‑T drum circuits — which can be imbued with numerous different characteristics thanks to a clutch of other circuits — but at its root the Beat Friend’s six tracks of kick, snare, hi‑hat, low and high toms and clave (which, despite its symbol, is curiously dubbed a woodblock in the manual) deliver all the smoothness and snap, the woody resonance and classy saturation that we love about the CR‑78. (If you need an example, just watch the video of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood playing Radiohead’s ‘The Numbers’ with one. Just, mwah. And that’s not even the last you’ll hear of Radiohead this review).

The similarities don’t stop there. At the core of the CR‑78, like many classic drum boxes of its era, was of course a bank of preset drum patterns, from ‘Slow Rock’ to ‘Boogie’ to ‘Samba’. While variation within those parameters was certainly achievable (and notwithstanding the step programming functionality of the far rarer WS‑1 Remote Programmer), you hardly need me to tell you that in the years since this workflow has been decisively superseded by infinitely more flexible transports.

It’s in this vein that the Beat Friend operates. OK, you won’t find ‘Disco‑2’ or ‘Waltz’, but you will find ‘Good Times’, ‘Zippy Jams’ and ‘Rockzilla’. I know what you’re thinking: who nowadays would want preset patterns? And, honestly, it’s what I thought too, until I switched the thing on. This is primarily because it quickly becomes clear that the patterns in...