Plankton Drummer £60
Sound Dust’s new Kontakt instrument blurs the waves between percussion and harmony. But is it sea-worthy? Cap’n Dave Gale sets sail
Pendle Poucher is the musical and creative force behind Sound Dust. As a successful media composer, in his own right, his music embraces tradition and quirkiness in equal measure, which might explain the stance of many of his software instruments.
They call him the Wanderer
The basic concept of Plankton Drummer begins with a bunch of superbly captured drum samples, drawn from acoustic and electronic sources. These even include a couple of drum machines owned by Orbital. The samples are then organised into a fairly traditional triggering layout: on a keyboard, C is the kick, E is the snare, and so on. These traditional instrument names don’t put in an appearance though, in favour of onomatopoeic interpretations, so kicks are described as ‘Boom’ and snares as ‘Smack’. The drum sound concept has been extended considerably, so while there are basic drum elements, the fun really begins when you start to play around with them within the Plankton environment.
There are 72 drum instruments, made up from more than 3000 samples, all of which are tuned. While you can access these for more conventional DAW-based sequencing over the majority of the keyboard layout, Plankton’s strength lay within its capacity to program lanes. These behave much like a DAW-based step editor, but with the ability to trigger each instrument’s lane on the fly.
Stay in Lane
The lanes are triggered from the upper part of a controller keyboard, between notes C5 and C6, at which point any programmed steps play out in sync with your DAW’s tempo. There are a number of preset snapshots to get you going, but the fun really starts as you begin to assemble your own lane constructs.
While there are basic drum elements, the fun really begins when you start to play around with them
We begin our programming using the default patch described as ‘A Blank Canvas’, using the upper-most lane labeled as sample. Each lane provides a step-based bar graph, with the height of each step in the sample lane selecting a different sample, so you’re not so much triggering one sample as choosing which sample you wish to play on a specific step. Moreover, you can assign the number of required steps in a lane, from 1 to 64. The only problem with this, as we discovered, is that with longer sequence lengths, it becomes very difficult to establish which beat of the bar is where. Hence, we reduced the number of steps in the sample lane to something a shade more manageable, such as eight or 16 steps.
The Velocity Lane works in conjunction with the Sample Lane, allowing you to dictate the force of the matching trigger.
Harmonically effected
