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 question serve as little more than jumping‑off points for a near‑limitless series of chance‑based events, and these I’d imagine would only be compromised if shoehorned in alongside an apparently more flexible step‑sequencing approach. As it is, far from repetitive, it’s actually quite a challenge to get the Beat Friend to do the same thing twice.

In Control, Sort Of...

Four main, interdependent control sections dictate the Beat Friend’s workflow. At the upper left of the Beat Friend’s panel is a small OLED display with knobs for patch, tempo and time signature. I mentioned a few of them above, but a second browse through the core presets yields some smile‑inducing inclusions: there’s ‘Idiothead’, which of course takes its cues from the unmistakeable pattern in Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’ (told you), originally played on an Analogue Systems RS8000 system if I remember. There’s also the distinctly Aphex Twin‑inspired, ratchet‑generous ‘Exciter’. Any of these can be adapted into different time signatures, with 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 5/8, 7/8 and 9/8 all on offer. As a fan of off‑piste time signatures, this did not leave me wanting.

The panel’s central row of six part‑specific sliders don’t represent volumes as you might expect (though when at the bottom that slider’s respective part is effectively off) but complexity. With all part sliders set to around halfway, the pattern plays ‘normally’, but moving any slider in either direction will add or reduce the complexity of that part. This rewards careful tweaking in a studio environment to some degree. You can achieve that perfect hi‑hat to high tom ratio if you desire (set and forget, if desired — with no other controls engaged the pattern will repeat according to its slider settings), though there is no way of saving a pattern at the time of writing. Skittering hi‑hats or complex tom phrases, dropped kicks and percussion breakdowns; it was all at my fingertips to play with performative abandon. And it wasn’t even difficult to quickly return all sliders back to their ‘normal’ setting if desired.

The third section, enigmatically named the Triforce, is itself comprised of three bipolar effects circuits, which interact with one another in all manner of interesting ways. The neutral, detented position of the Triforce controls is when they’re all facing inwards, and turning each one way or the other engages different effects: low‑pass filtering or waveshaping distortion for the top knob, sample‑rate reduction or bit‑crushing for the left knob, and delay or reverb for the right knob. In a playful move, Audio.Computer stipulate there are also a trio of ‘hidden effect parameters’ that can only be controlled with specific, undisclosed combinations of the knobs. Because why not? Not that I could find them, mind you. I would very much have liked the delay time to be adjustable, which would open up more rhythmic options; hopefully this option will arrive with future firmware.

This is as good a time as any to state what may well be obvious by now: from its literature to its interface, the Beat Friend epitomises the term ‘playful’. I must say, as someone who generally wrinkles their nose at twee language or overly quirky graphics on electronic instruments (remember the ‘Trophy’ section on the microKORG 2? Yuck), I don’t find Audio.Computer’s brand of whimsy nearly as irritating as I thought I would. Sure, its ‘Super Secret Settings’ section turns out to be little more than a general utility menu, and if you have an anti‑hipster streak in you then you might roll your eyes at the fact that the thick paper manuals are printed by the company’s own in‑house letterpress printer; but not only does the Beat Friend back all this up with some deadly serious sonic punch, it really does require the equivalent amount of playfulness from the user to work at its best. So at the end of the day, whatever your design ethos, I’ll say form and function are married brilliantly here.

The last core control section is a trio of knobs labelled Jazz, Enthusiasm and Decay, which descend down the left side of the panel. The Jazz knob offers two different flavours of swing, while the Enthusiasm knob injects more chance into proceedings by ostensibly adding and taking away notes from the drum pattern according to the position of the knob — ranging from occasional variation to all‑out chaos. Decay extends the envelope on the kick, toms and clave, leaving the snare and hats intact to maintain groove, though it doesn’t seem possible to tune pitches, which is a particular shame when it comes to the bass‑esque role that the kick can take on at maximum decay times.

In addition to the panel’s main control sections is a Fill button and accompanying knob at the top of the panel. This button triggers a fairly simple snare roll, adjustable with the knob, which can be used fairly conventionally to simply link sections, but gets very interesting indeed when used to trigger quick bursts of variation at any stage of the bar, particularly at faster tempos. Add this to all the aforementioned controls, and the result is that most rare of beasts: one that is very difficult to make a genuine mistake on, which somehow sounds good whatever you do with it and yet still manages to be incredibly open‑ended and creative.

As far as I’m concerned it [Beat Friend] might just have the makings of a classic.

Conclusion

So imagine the scene: I’m hitting the Fill button here and there; flicking one slider up and another down, bit‑crushing or low‑pass filtering my drum sounds; adding dashes of irregularity or swing, adjusting the envelope. I was sending flurries of beats in all sorts of musical directions with this most improvisation‑hungry drum machine, whose greatest trick is pretending that its functions are flung on impetuously, when in fact they have clearly all been selected painstakingly to toe the line between reliability and unpredictability. If repetitious, clinical beat‑making is your passion (and I do not say that pejoratively), then I daresay the Beat Friend is not for you. For everyone else, it’s every bit as affordable as it is flexible, as playful as it is powerful. The Beat Friend doesn’t just look retro; as far as I’m concerned it might just have the makings of a classic.