Erica Synths have resurrected the now‑legendary Hexinverter percussion modules to create a drum machine that’s as immediate and playable as it is individual.

HexDrums is a collaboration between Hexinverter Électronique, a Canadian Eurorack modular company that closed its doors in 2022 due to post‑pandemic supply chain issues, and Erica Synths, who subsequently acquired the rights and continued manufacturing, selling, and supporting some of Hexinverter’s most popular modules.

Amongst those modules were the Mutant Drum series, a collection of x0x‑inspired drum voices that have become the core of this analogue drum machine. There are 10 drum voices comprising two bass drums, a flexible percussion engine called Machine, snare, clap, rimshot, hi‑hat (open and closed), and two sample‑based cymbals. The most obvious equivalence is with the mighty TR‑909. The HexDrums wears the influence proudly, but is not shy about deviating from established norms and treading its own path.

Hex Appeal

The HexDrums is a chunky desktop unit that comes in a lively black‑and‑yellow livery. It offers real‑time control over every drum parameter, individual outputs for all voices, a hands‑on 64‑step sequencer with pattern memory, a song mode, a stereo master compressor and an overdrive circuit. Operation is intuitive, and if you’ve ever used a classic analogue drum machine, you’ll barely need to open the manual.

At 455 x 216 x 91mm, Hexdrums is a solid desktop unit. Its all‑metal casing, black wooden side panels, mechanical cherry keys, and panel‑mounted pots and switches make it feel robustly old‑school. All the inputs and outputs on the rear are on proper grown‑up quarter‑inch jacks and 5‑pin MIDI sockets. In short, the build quality is superb.

The Drums

The first of HexDrums’ two bass drum voices is ideal for the heavy kick drum commonly used in techno, electro and many other electronic music genres. It’s a combination of a triangle core VCO (square or sine wave), a sub‑oscillator, a pitch envelope with variable decay, a pitch control with a range of several octaves and an adjustable click level. The results are very flexible, ranging from soft, short clicky kick drums to long disco toms, typical 909 kicks, and massive gabber techno window‑shakers.

The second bass drum is based on the TR‑808 twin‑T damped sine‑wave oscillator. Unlike the TR‑808, however, you can tune the fundamental frequency to match your song, or high enough to create tom sounds. It has just three controls (excluding level): pitch, decay and tone.

The Machine voice is the most complex of all, capable of a wide variety of percussion, synth voices and special effects. It consists of two synthesis parts, a dual‑oscillator membrane and a noise section. With a variety of envelopes to provide amplitude and pitch variation (one of which can be permanently opened for drone sounds), you can achieve semi‑realistic snares, dark techno rumbles, bass sounds, zaps, blips and noise blasts.

The dedicated snare drum voice uses two bridged‑T sine‑wave oscillators, adding a noise element, two octaves of tonal pitch control, and a resonant filter to create a surprisingly versatile snare. It will emulate 808 snares with ease, and 909 snares up to a point (I couldn’t quite get the ‘snap’ right).

The clap uses a linear feedback shift register to create the noise elements, essentially producing white noise that, when pitched down, becomes more digital‑sounding (like 8‑bit noise). There’s a simulated reverb that doesn’t sound like a real reverb but adds some low‑frequency body, and a band‑pass filter. Decay and filtering are also available for general tone shaping.

The Rimshot is next, and can be switched to sound like a Clave. There are the usual pitch and decay controls, plus a state‑variable filter. With the wide pitch range and filter, the rimshot can be coaxed to produce kick drums and toms, and the filter, with high resonance and mod envelope, can tease out electronic zaps and special effects.

The Hi‑hats circuit bundles both open and closed hats into a single 808‑inspired section. The Decay controls the open hi‑hat length. There’s a band‑pass filter for further shaping, and you can de‑latch the hats so that a closed hi‑hat will not choke the open hi‑hat.

Finally, we come to the cymbal section, which is another dual‑voice group. The Crash and Ride voices differ from all the others in that they use samples. Each cymbal has its own pitch and decay parameters. The pitch controls adjust the sample rate to alter the pitch, resulting in some wonderfully crunchy, lo‑fi aliasing at lower pitches. The Ride also has a loop switch that repeats the sample for the duration of the decay, creating the illusion of a longer sample, or even a fake delay effect.

Both the Crash and Delay can be chosen from one of 10 sample sets, and one rather cool feature is that you can replace the Crash and Ride samples by uploading your own 48kHz, 16‑bit samples to Hexdrum’s internal flash memory. You do this by entering USB mode, which makes the internal disk mountable on your PC or Mac. You can replace the factory samples with literally anything: vocal one‑shots, your favourite kicks or snares, or, dare I suggest, some different crash and ride cymbals. Neat! But it is marred by the single shared selector control that changes both samples at once. You cannot, for example, select Ride sample 3 and Crash sample 7. You can choose only 3 and 3, or 7 and 7. It certainly won’t replace your sampler, but it’s still fun to import your own sounds into the system.

The Master Section

The master section includes two effects that can be applied to the master bus. Sounds coming from the individual outputs are not affected (in fact, if you have cables connected to the individual outputs, those voices are removed from the master outputs).

First up is the compressor: a classic soft‑knee design with 40dB of gain, threshold, ratio and dry/wet mix controls. The exact ratios and threshold are unknown and set by ear. You can also switch response time between three options: slow, mid and fast. A single LED serves as a rudimentary gain‑reduction meter.

In addition to the compressor is a drive circuit that adds some distortion. There’s little to it, just a drive control and a blend (dry/wet) control. Overall, these two master effects do a great job of adding some weight and extra harmonics to the mixed output, and they feel well‑tuned to the source material. These are master effects that you will actually use.

The Sequencer

Once again, the Roland influence is undeniable in the sequencer section. The row of mechanical cherry keys at the base of the unit comprises the transport and sequencer programming. Each sequence can be up to 64 steps in length, and each voice can have a different number of steps. Perfect for polymeters.

Notes can be programmed, in typical x0x style, or tapped in and recorded live. Cherry keys aren’t ideal for finger drumming, but the option is there if you need it.

With a total of 16 banks of 16 patterns, there should be enough storage space for anyone, and you can backup and restore patterns over USB if needed. You can copy patterns between banks and slots, making it a breeze to program pattern variations.

As well as having different lengths per voice, the sequencer also provides playback direction (forward, back, two ping‑pong options, and random), shuffle, and clock divisions, which they call ‘Scale’ (1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1, 3/2, 2 and 4). These options really help craft patterns that escape the typical one‑, two‑, or four‑bar loops that x0x‑style drum machines can get trapped in.

There are some nifty per‑step features, too. Like the TR‑909, the HexDrums offers both global and per‑voice accents that can add dynamics to a pattern. Accents are visualised using the LEDs embedded in each key. Maybe it’s my eyes getting old, but I found it difficult to tell the difference between the full brightness used to show an accented step and the slightly dimmer brightness used to denote no accent.

Each step also supports ratchets, with up to eight repeats per step, probability (a percentage chance of the step triggering), odds (play the step every X repeats), and microtiming, which allows you to move the step off‑grid.

Building songs and performances is also well thought out. Switching between patterns on the fly is helped by the ‘master length’ function, which dictates when patterns should switch. For example, if this is set to 16 (steps), a pattern will always play to the end of a bar, before switching to the next pattern. Also, if you reprogram a pattern during a performance, you can hit the Reload button to return to the stored pattern. The flip side is that when programming, you need to remember to save your changes before moving to another pattern, or you’ll lose them. Mutes and solos can also be employed during a performance, and a Roll function allows for some ‘note repeat’‑style drum rolls.

Song mode can chain up to 16 patterns from a single bank in any order and repeat them up to nine times if required (an odd choice, but I guess that’s the highest number they could display on the LCD screen). Songs can loop, or come to a neat stop at the end of the pattern list. It’s a shame that you can only make a song from patterns in a single bank.

In Use

If you are a fan of the Roland TR‑909, you will likely adore the HexDrums. It has a big sound, which lends itself to classic techno, electro and house music. I expect there will be much online opinion about individual voices, and whether you happen to like the kick drums (I do) or the clap (I don’t), will be down to personal preference.

What I love about the HexDrums is that it feels very immediate and responsive. The sequencer’s timing is particularly pleasing, even when clocked by an external source and getting the most out of it involves being hands‑on: tweaking sounds as a pattern plays and reprogramming on the fly. Jeff Mills (seek out his legendary 909 performances) would do amazing things with the HexDrums.

There are a few minor design decisions that I found perplexing. Why, for example, do the hi‑hats use a band‑pass filter that almost entirely filters out the hi‑hats when the Cutoff knob is set below 50 percent? Why do the Crash and Ride samples have to be selected together in pairs? Why do some Shift key functions not have a label printed on the front panel? (Shift+Last is the ‘master length’ parameter, but has no label to remind you.)

Some people may find the lack of parameter locking or automation recording disappointing. I debated not mentioning it because it is a feature outside the instrument’s design scope. But people will ask if it’s possible, and now they have their answer.

The HexDrums is a techno monster. It covers ‘classic’ territory with panache, and adds just enough modernisations to keep the 40‑year‑old drum machine design feeling fresh.

The HexDrums is a techno monster. It covers ‘classic’ territory with panache, and adds just enough modernisations to keep the 40‑year‑old drum machine design feeling fresh. It feels immediate and responsive. The timing is tight and the sound is raw and in‑your‑face. It invites performance, and sounds great whilst doing it. The Hexinverter legacy is in safe hands with Erica Synths, who have proved that they know how to make a great drum machine.

Information

£1299 including VAT.

www.ericasynths.lv

$1559

www.ericasynths.lv

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