BATTALION Review
Unfiltered Audio haooked me up with their second instrument, Battalion, an 8 part drum synthesizer, sampler, and sequencer. Battalion is Unfiltered Audio’s most expansive tool yet, containing a deep synthesizer voice editor, a wide variety of drum synth engines and sampling methods, a deep and comprehensive sequencer engine, as well as effects and various performance controls. The UI is simple and clean, but each page is filled with a dense array of controls, this might be overwhelming to many, but if you can handle DrumComputer, you can handle Battalion. Over all, the sound is great, there’s an “always reset” switch for each drum voice, ensuring consistent transients and predictable quality, something very necessary for a drum machine. It is the perfect IDM/glitch machine, but is also capable of many other genres as well.
DRUM VOICE
Each voice is broken up into a few sections, you have your synth and sampler engines, a filter/ distortion, modulation, and mixing. I’ll wrap back around to the synth and sampler as they are the deepest and most interesting of the bunch.
The multimode filter contains all your standard filter types, as well as a variety of combs, these are great for shaping your drum sound or adding some ring with the comb filters. I do wish there was a standard bell curve for boosting a frequency without cutting anything. This is followed by a distortion that can be placed either before or after the filter. There’s six different distortion algorithms, but they aren’t quite to my personal taste. The tape algorithm is nice, as it really gives som punch to the low end, but none of the algorithms really quite give the right “bite”. For example the bitcrusher seems to fizzle more than give that harsh decimation quality. I do enjoy the sample rate reducer quite a bit though. I would love to see the hard clip from the main output as a filter distortion type.
Each voice boasts a variety of modulation options, there’s two envelopes for shaping the drum curve, I’m not sure if these are quite the ideal curves I’d use for drum synthesis, but they are more than adequate. The hold stage is convenient for the sampler, but mostly gets in the way of other drum synthesis. Two LFOs provide a lot of modulation options, this is great for adding slow or chaotic motion to a drum part. A random LFO shape is available, but what I find most fun is de-syncing the LFO and pushing it into audio rate. Each LFO can go up to 440 Hz letting you do some crazy cross modulation that almost becomes part of the synthesis.
SYNTH ENGINE:
Battalion contains 24 synth engines, each with a pitch control and four additional control that change per engine. These range from standard drum synthesis, to utilities, to wild experiments. The sheer variety gives you plenty to play with, this little synth section could probably be a plugin all on its own. I wont cover all 24 engines here, perhaps I will as a separate article, if I do I’ll have already linked it.
Kick: The kick is fairly decent, it’s not my ideal envelope, but with a little bit of filter magic it can really get some solid punch. I tend to mostly use the filter for creating kicks though. There’s a couple other kick themed engines as well for different flavors.
Hat: The hat engine is cool, but a little low pitched, I’d love to get it higher and crispier, it does actually work quite well as a snare sometimes.
Snare: Not a huge fan of this snare, there’s another engine called “haywire” that seems to work better for snares, but I tend to prefer using samples.
Clap: The clap engine is really neat, you can set a clap speed, and number of claps. WIth the “rev.decay” all the way down, it can make some really cool insect and guiro sounds.
Modal: A really nice physical modeling engine, simple and sweet, but gets some neat tones. Sounds nice into rate crush distortion.
FM: A 2 operator FM drum voice, gets some really interesting tones, I tend to turn the envelope off for this one. Nice and metallic.
Reson: This one is super neat, has a nice airy and metallic sound. Adjusting the material dial gives you a range of tones.
Terraining: This one comes out of Lion, along with some of the following engines like shame and entangle, there’s a wide range of crazy buzzy metallic sounds here.
SAMPLER:
The sampler currently contains four engines, again with unique controls per engine. There’s hundreds of samples ot chose from, and you can load your own as well. Start and end positions can be modulated, it’s often fun to map start position to Macro 2 and sequence the sample start to generate beats.
Classic: The basic sampler engine, gives you a bit more control over gain and tone than the others.
Phase Warp: I’ve plaed with this one the least, it plays through the sample at varying speeds depending on the shape, split, swing and mirror settings. Great for DJ scratches and warped effects.
Cloner: I can’t say I understand this one, I believe it to be some sort of convolution based resampling. This gives a bit of a softer tone, but you can increase the variation control so each hit gets a slightly different interpretation.
Granular: Probably the most fun, I hope to see this in Lion or as part of a new synth one day. A full on granular engine. Blur gives a bit of chaos to the grain position, rate and size let you shape the granular texture. You can just set every voice to granular and use Battalion like an ambient drone maker.
SEQUENCER
The sequencer page is deep, this isn’t just your standard 16 step “TR” style sequencer, there are a variety of lanes, settings, and modifiers. Each track can have its own sequencer length, so you can easily do polymetric sequencing. On top of this, the various modifier lanes can have their own length as well, so you can have a trigger patter of 16 steps, but set pitch to 15 steps, so that it shifts with each iteration. Between this, and probability, you can craft incredibly intricate generative patterns.
Speaking of generation, there is a pattern generator if you are feeling uninspired, this lets you set a “Fill” value, select from a variety of patterns, and rotate the generated pattern. Fill determines how many steps are filled in. The variety of available patterns will be determined by how many steps are filled in. I actually haven’t played with this feature at all yet, but I could see it being fun to map fill and pattern to midi controllers and just play with different combinations.
A “modify” section lets you nudge the playhead for the pattern over, add swing, create exponential rhythms, or add randomness with “density”. Next the “settings” area is a bit tricky, it’s nice to have a mult option, but some of the length and reset controls are a bit finicky and not quite obvious at first. A dropdown menu of 64 length options is not a friendly sight, and you’ll just want to double click and manually enter your reset value rather than trying to set it with the dial.
There are so many sequencer lanes per voice, it’s really quite insane, there’s the obvious velocity and pitch lanes, as well as shift, which is for nudging an individual step. “Ratchet” allows you to retrigger a step up to 6 steps within that steps duration, excellent for all sorts of tuplets. Envelope is for adjusting envelope timing per step, sends allow you to output a step to either delay or reverb, and Macro 2 controls macro 2 obviously. Probability is perfect for giving some steps a chance to trigger, but it can also give them a chance to ratchet. And finally, one that I just noticed, variation lets you set some control randomness per step, I think there are presets I would have used this in if I had known about it at the time.
A performance page gives you a ton of controls over all the voices at once, here you can add density, probability and ratcheting to the entire drum machine. You can transpose from this page as well, and add variation to everything all at once, which is great fun. I really enjoy playing with the decay control, as it can choke down all your drums for a technical feel. A depth control pulls back all these settings at once, letting you transform Battalion between two states.
Finally the mixer page lets you see the volume of each part, assign chokes, output routing and play with the delay and reverb controls. Trigger and choke have a cool target “random” that randomly triggers or chokes any voice per step trigger. Additionally, you can even choke the reverb and delay from a drum voice. The delay is cool, it has an interesting “glitch” control that can bring some wild energy to your mix. I would have preferred a cleaner reverb though. Everything gets fed into a maximizer, a basic eq, and a final clipping stage that has a a couple different algorithms. I would have loved a bitcrusher on the output, but I also think Battalion needs an output trim, I love using the last clipper for sound design, but there’s no way to bring the level back down to keep all presets at a standard.
There’s a lot to Battalion, it is quite a powerful and complex tool, one you could spend hours in and craft entire beats from. As I was making presets for Battalion, I was beginning to be inspired to create an album, there’s just so much to play with, and when you get into the right groove, it really gets involved in the process. There’s som inspirations from Elektron in here, and it makes me want to revisit my Syntakt. I really appreciate the attention to voice reset and envelopes, too often fun drum machines are limited by their ability to create predictable triggers and transients. If your transient is all over the place because of poor retriggering, it can limit the variety of patterns worth creating. There’s still many things I’d like to see, but I believe they plan to update this one with more patterns, presets and even perhaps more features in the future, so I can’t wait to see how it grows. There’s still quite a lot I haven’t even covered in this review, so you’ll have to try it out for yourself.