BreakBud

What it does

A breakbeat machine that synthesizes every drum instead of playing samples. Six voices, kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, rim and an FM hit, sit under a 4x4 grid of 16 pads, and each pad keeps its own pattern and its own voice settings. Step count, rate, swing, nudge and humanize are set per lane, so parts drift into polyrhythms, and a generate section rolls new patterns from density, offbeat and complexity.

In the demo

Jade builds a kit from an empty preset, shaping pitch, decay, punch and drive on each drum, then generates across all 16 pads at once. She routes six separate outputs in AUM, drives the pads from a Keystep on one MIDI channel while playing voices on another, and records the MIDI into Logic.

Worth knowing

The mixer has kick-keyed side chain but no solo, and the effects chain the manual describes has been taken out of the app.