Noise Lab - Drum Designer

Drum Designer is a six-voice analog drum module from Stockholm-based Noise Lab. Kick, snare, hi-hat, metal, resonator, and clap — all original circuit designs inspired by classic drum machines but very much their own thing. The layout is clean and immediate: each voice gets its own column with decay, tone, and pitch controls where applicable, plus a dedicated gate input and audio output. All outputs are normalled to a mix out, so you can go from individual processing to a single stereo pair without repatching.

The standard voices cover a lot of ground. The kick sits low and heavy with a tunable fundamental and variable attack bite. The snare ranges from tight and snappy to long and roomy thanks to a depth switch that simulates different shell sizes. Hi-hats go from clipped ticks to ringing open hats, with a separate input for independently controlling the open hi-hat envelope; for instance, you could patch a slow LFO in there to add some life to it. The metal voice does everything from thin ride cymbal to raw sheet-metal crash, and the clap rounds things out with an adjustable tail for added room. The most curious section is the Resonator — a self-oscillating bandpass filter that can be excited by internal noise, a trio of square waves, or any external signal you feed into the aux input. It's the wildcard of the bunch, good for pitched percussion, drones, or sounds that don't have a proper name yet :)

This is a really nice analog drum module with enough character per voice to hold its own, plus a Resonator section that is its own chapter — great stuff!

Features:

• Six analog drum voices: Kick, Snare, Hi-hat, Metal, Resonator, Clap
• Individual output per voice, normalled to mix output
• Kick with tunable pitch (~40–70 Hz), tone, and decay
• Snare with pitch, decay, and three-position depth switch
• Hi-hat with tone sweep and separate open hi-hat gate input
• Metal voice with tone, decay, and colour switch
• Resonator with self-oscillating bandpass filter, two tone controls, and switchable excitation source (noise / square waves / external)
• Aux input for external audio into the Resonator
• Gate-driven inputs (0–5V)
• Clap with adjustable tail