VXXY - DCM8 chiptune drummachine

The DCM8 by british manufacturer VXXY is a small drum machine specialized in chiptune sounds with their rough digital retro charme of old computer games. Besides playing the preset sound you can edit your own ones. The sequencer allows up to 32 steps per pattern.

The sound memory of the DCM8 consists of 255 sounds - 223 are preset sounds generated with digital synthesis, FM, digital filter and bit-distortion and the 32 other sounds can be edited by the user. Besides the usual standard wave forms the oscillator has 4Bit wavetables, samples, algorithms and frequency modulation pluse noise generated by various pseudo-random generators.

The unit is operated with the eight main buttons, mode buttons one encoder and the LCd display with 2x16 digits. A real-time undo/redo function with eight commands makes editing easy and is a nice feature for live use.

The sequencer offers 64 memory slots for patterns (8 banks with 8 memories each) and a song memory for 8 songs with 128 patterns. Each pattern can be 8, 16 or 32 steps long and have half, normal or double time scales. Per each step you can set the decay, the frequency and the volume. Clearing, copying and pasting patterns is possible over 8, 16 or 32 steps.

All settings are saved in a non-volatile EEPROM and can be backed up via MIDI SysEx.