Coming at us from Göteborg Sweden, Elektron Music Machines brought with them their newest machine to demo and display, a beautiful 8 voice drum machine with individual outputs and 12 tracks, aptly named RYTM. This is the first music machine from Elektron to feature drum pads. There are 12 pressure and velocity sensitive pads to finger drum away on with the RYTM. The pads can send midi out, are backlit, and allow for the hi hat channels to choke, so that an open hi hat decay will stop when a closed hi hat sound is triggered, for example. Sound generation comes from a hybrid analog and digital sampling engine, the analog voices are tailored to their specific drum sounds while samples can be any one shot sounds that you can imagine to load up and layer together. Each voice has an analog multimode filter as well as analog distortion, on the send bus there is a digital delay and a digital reverb, finally the signal path ends with analog distortion and an analog compressor on the main bus. The compressor in RYTM is no joke. This machine packs some serious punch so watch your levels with it; compression is smooth like butter though and can be pushed quite hard. You can even run a stereo external signal through the inputs supplied and use that lovely compressor on other devices and master busses as you need. Lastly, the Elektron RYTM can provide support for din sync devices with the midi out and thru connections. Those of you out there with vintage Roland devices like a TB303, TR808, or MC202, can receive proper din sync clocking without need for any additional midi to din sync converter.
Novamusik has uploaded this excellent video of the Elektron RYTM and Elektron Analog Keys for everyone to enjoy; check it out:
Article by
Natefrogg (Nathon Plumlee)
