Arturia DrumBrute Impact Analog Drum Machine

Sequencer is great, but it takes a lot of work to get a balanced, useable sound (unless you're going for a blown out distorted sound). Toms are pitched too low to be useable imo, unless you have the tuning set to max they sound like bass drums. The bass drum is a little flabby and boomy, I wish it could be more blippy. Sequencer is really good, and ability to introduce randomness is great, feels like it's a real person playing. It's fun to play and it's good for the price, but sonically it just feels unnecessarily compromised. Maybe it will sound cool and interesting in 15-20 years though lol.

Let's be clear: for the price, I am absolutely in love with this unit. And I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to someone looking for an "inexpensive" analog drum machine. The workflow is intuitive. Programming basic tracks is simple, and flexible. The fancier features are well documented. The kick is fantastic, as are the hats and main snare; If you're looking for some basic 808-ish sounds, you'll be able to get there quickly. It also makes for a pretty great drum MIDI controller with a DAW. That said, I have a few quibbles that prevent me from rating this 5 stars: 1. The "FM Drum" seems fiddly to get anything usable out of, beyond a Simmons-style "beeoo beeoo" tom. 2. The "Snare 2" voice seems vanishingly similar to the "Snare 1" unless its set to "Clap" 3. The "Cow" bell voice has no "color" options. The only voice on the unit to be fixed that way. It seems like including _something_ (a stick, or shaker, or something) wouldn't have been too hard. 4. The pitch range on the "Tom Hi" doesn't go as far as I would like. I'm I picking nits? Yes, definitely. I would still buy it again if I'd known these things going into it. But if some future firmware upgrade could resolve one or more of these, I certainly wouldn't complain.

For the money, this is the best analog drum machine on the market. But putting value aside, this thing just sounds very good to my ears. To me, the hats sound kind of similar to Roland 808 and 606 hats, which I like. The kick is really thumpy and thick, which can be shaped a lot with the decay and tuning knobs. You can easily get those long booming 808 kick/bass sounds with this, as well as short, aggressive 909-y kicks. The snare is my favorite sound on the machine. It sounds kind of 909-y to my ears, and has similar controls to a 909 snare. I wish it had a tuning knob for the snare, but that's literally my only complaint with the whole machine. The second snare is great too, and it becomes a clap when you turn on "color." The cymbal, toms, cowbell, and FM tone are also very usable. The "color" effect works differently on each track but gives you more variety in your sound and just sounds very tasteful to me. The distortion is also a nice effect to have built in, and sounds very pleasant. The sequencer is very intuitive and easy to use. You can nudge notes off-time on a per-step basis, which is very cool, and useful for unquantized-feeling beats. I love the stutter/beat-repeat thing (which is found on lots of arturia stuff, like the beatstep pro). It's a great way to add fills and buildups while playing, and is just a very fun live performance tool. MIDI/analog clock sync is very simple and intuitive to control. I hate digging through menus to sync midi clocks, so it's nice I don't have to do that. The whole thing feels very sturdy and doesn't feel cheap. I highly recommend this fun little machine.

My band plays a blend of jam/electronic live music. We don't have a live drummer, but we want to sound as good as possible and the DrumBrute Impact is great for our purposes. Furthermore, I play Bass guitar and this is awesome for jamming alone to new grooves because I can let the drum track roll while I play. After about two days I felt like I had "mastered" using this thing! At first there was a bit of a learning curve, but that's true with any new gear. I couldn't be more happy with this purchase. If you are completely new to using drum machines or just drumming in general, I'd suggest that you look up some drum sheet music for songs you want to sound like and program accordingly. This was a big help for me. Also, the presets are all pretty cool and you can definitely find a few that suit your purposes right out of the box.

I grew up using Alesis drum machines, and loved them... but the Impact is the coolest and most unique I have experienced. I went from a novice with it to having a good command of how to jam and edit in about an hour. Roller and Step Repeat are very useful and fun for live.

all the reviews are true, great unit, sounds awesome.