Drum Farm is a two‑, three‑ or sometimes four‑channel source of percussion sounds hatched and harvested through a quirky workflow of sampling and digital jiggery‑pokery. It has a good balance of intuitiveness for instant drum satisfaction, and manual‑reading complexity to get your button combos and layer functions down. It’s a real grower of a module that gets more exciting the deeper you plough into it.
At 24HP it’s a pretty big module and looks a little bit odd. While the layout is nice and clear, it never quite finds its own symmetry. You are naturally drawn to the right side where all the action appears to be, but actually you’ll discover that there’s action to be had all over the place. You could see it as five separate modules working together in a sort of battery farm of noises, and honestly, I wouldn’t mind having them as individual modules because each section has some fascinating functions.
Drum Synth
Kicking us off, we have a Drum Synth section, in the top right, where you can select any one of 16 sounds on the nice, chunky knob. The sounds are drawn from virtual analogue, spectral‑ and physical‑modelling algorithms, and have two controllable synth parameters, along with decay and pitch controls. You’ll find familiar and differently useful sounds with a lot of versatility and some very interesting extremes.
On the other side of the module is the Sampler. It has a micro SD card that holds 16 banks of 16 preset samples and another 16 banks for user samples. It comes with a bunch of sampled drum kits, cymbals, noises and whatnot that you can load up, and then step through using a pair of buttons.
So, you have two really decent and different sound sources: one synth‑based and one sample‑based. If Drum Farm was just those things, it would be a very cool drum module. But there’s a little bit of innovation going on between the two in the shape of the two Player modules, which make this uniquely brilliant. Once you’ve crafted your synth‑drum sound or stumbled upon the perfect sample, you press ‘Get’ on one of the Players and tap the trigger button of the source, and it’s sampled into the player. You can then dial in another sound and grab that too.
Once you’ve grasped the process, which takes a little bit of trial and error (the manual is more factual than explanatory), it’s a smooth workflow of finding and grabbing sounds, tweaking, re‑finding, resampling, and grabbing again. But that’s just the basics. Player 1 has 16 slots, so you can pull in a whole array of sounds. That could be a bank from the Sampler, or a mix of some individual samples, some synth sounds or what Player 2 is currently playing, spread across all the slots. It’s at that moment that you go looking to see if you can find some modulation to turn the slot selector knob and flip through those 16 samples. Ah, Knobula have thought of that, and using Shift you can use the slot knob to choose from 16 different ways the samples are flipped in real time. Player 2 feels a bit underpowered in comparison, as it can only handle one sample at a time, but that’s not to say you don’t have enough stuff going on already.
Talking of which, the Drum Synth by itself can be triggered and act as a third channel of sound, and one that offers some real‑time modulation possibilities. You can also use the Sampler preview channel as a fourth source of sounds, although that would get in the way of using it as a live resampler, which can get very interesting. There is an external sampling input you can plug anything into, which takes you down the road of sampling oscillators, notes and sequences. Farm it out to Player 1, and you’ve got a 16‑note sequence being randomly jumbled by the internal sample flipper. Player 2 can actually take on a useful role in being able to apply its decay envelope to anything coming into the external input, giving you a cool gate effect.
FX
Then there’s a comprehensive effects engine: 16 useful effects in two layers. In the first layer, you can have reverb or delay, and then in the second layer you can have any of the other 14, which cover things like flanging to filters, reversals, compression, lo‑fi and strangeness. You can start getting clever by sampling the drum sounds through the effects, then applying another effect to the output. Each channel can choose to go through the effects or not, and you also have two outputs to route things separately.
Rounding things off, there are three CV inputs that map to whatever knob you move after patching it, and two assignable triggers that can turn the record on and off, or trigger accents and step through samples. The whole setup can be saved as a Session and reloaded at any time. You just have to make sure you’re in User mode and not ROM mode, which is far too easy to get wrong.
Knobula have really thought this module through, and it more than earns its HP.
I used Drum Farm quite a bit at a surface level in live performance before digging down into the sampling and resampling possibilities. I’ve gone from thinking it was a useful source of sounds, but takes up a bit too much space, to being totally invested in the sampling/resampling, sequence grabbing, sample flipping and effects performance possibilities. Knobula have really thought this module through, and it more than earns its HP; in fact, I could really do with a 2‑Player expansion.