Reckoner by Sevish

published on 2025-05-10T10:16:57Z

Beatmonger is the drum machine VST I made using Plugdata/Heavy. It's an 808 soundalike with some changes and I also gave it the quijada sound from the MiniPops. The VST exposes all kinds of parameters to tweak the sound of each drum in a way you can't do with sampled drum sounds. Each drum sits on its own audio output so I can easily apply different processing to each sound in the DAW. Why did I spend every evening one week in December 2024 to make this drum machine VST? Because I wanted something I could reuse again and again, in the spirit of oldskool drum machines, but with my own sonic stamp on it. Beatmonger is not publicly available but there are plenty resources online to DIY your own stuff in Plugdata! Make some music, it will keep you out of trouble! This is my first ever finished track with the 8edo tuning. I always found it really tough to make it work. The trick here was not to think harmonically, but pure melody and rhythm. You'll also hear that I'm using timbres that feature overtones that are aligned to 8edo. This is one way to smooth over the sound when you're using a tuning that doesn't align well with the harmonic series. I actually produced loads of these timbres as loopable wav files that I could easily load into a sampler, for various different edos. Each wav is a pseudo-harmonic series but the partials are aligned to an edo. But 0 of you may ask, how did you make them loopable, as edos are inharmonic and thus the sum of overtones would be aperiodic? I actually approximated those inharmonic overtones using harmonics of a very low fundamental frequency that is tied to the duration of the wav file. In this way, I'm using harmonics that approximate inharmonics that approximate harmonics. It works ok enough. Again, Plugdata was used here, mainly to automate the setup and recording of these loopable wav files for each edo. I spent an evening going from idea to complete sample pack. I'm willing to make these public, but I don't know if anybody really wants to mess with them. They're slightly unpleasant with a "bell organ" kinda quality, so you actually need to incorporate them into a sound design - they're not good standalone sounds. Crucial plugins used on Reckoner: TAL Sampler, TAL Bassline-101, Dexed, Airwindows ToTape6, TAL Dub-X, Beatmonger v2 etc.