Slammer

What it does

A sampled percussion instrument built from struck junk: bass drums, buckets, crowbars, snares, shovels, pipes and metal sticks. Twelve slots sit across the keyboard and repeat at each octave, every one remappable to another key, and each slot chooses its own sample and then gets gain, pan, pitch, decay, transient, low and high shelf, reverb, dirt and a gain curve with range. Kit-wide there is a delay, a dirt section with squeeze and distortion, and a bass, mid and treble EQ, each carrying its own presets. The preset packs split into natural sets, distorted sets, natural percussion and distorted percussion.

In the demo

Jade plays the slots from the on-screen keys to show the mapping, swaps a bucket handle and stick for a shovel, then hands the timing to Rosetta XOX and runs one pattern through every preset pack. She plays out with a long industrial piece built on tuned shovels and pipes, seven string guitar and bass.

Worth knowing

Nothing inside it sequences patterns, so parts come from the keys, a MIDI controller or a host sequencer. Jade uses it as percussion next to a conventional kit rather than in place of one.