Anyone else using Boom 808?

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chimp_spanner
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14 Mar 2015

So I was a little reluctant to get this based on the price, but I was also kind of unhappy with the sound I was getting from Kong's drum synths. Plus I wanted an authentic sound and a pre made interface. Overall I do like it but one thing I've found is that the attack portion of the kick seems kind of weird, like it's not sync'ing properly. It's hard to explain. Every few hits the initial "click" will be kind of weak or missing, at anything less than 127 velocity anyway. Also if you turn the tone down there's still a click/pop at the start that isn't really musical. Does anyone have experience of the real 808, and is this normal behaviour? Or should I contact the dev and hope for an update?

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moofi
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17 Mar 2015

I assume the waveform isn´t reset on retrigger so the phase differs every hit resulting in different attacksounds. Don´t know how the original behaves though.

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chimp_spanner
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17 Mar 2015

Yeah that's what it sounds like. Would be an easy fix, assuming it's not by design. I'll look into it!

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Benedict
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17 Mar 2015

The click is DC offset from when the wave doesn't perfectly start at a zero crossing. Seeing the wave is free running then every hit is different. If you play a REAL analog drum synth you will find they all do this. It is part of the charm and character. 

If you need the sounds to sound like samples then use samples which are exactly the same sound every time.

:)
Benedict Roff-Marsh
Completely burned and gone

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chimp_spanner
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17 Mar 2015

Yeah I guess that's kind of why I asked; I've not had experience of the real thing :) It does kind of feel like the resulting sound isn't entirely musical (especially at extremely low volumes and tone settings). But overall I feel the sound of the Re overall outweighs this one small gripe. It still sounds great in a song though. 

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chimp_spanner
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17 Mar 2015

From the developer:

"The click is by design - it’s part of the original circuitry on the 808, which I ported over as faithfully as possible. The circuit for the kick doubles the frequency for maybe a millisecond, and this is at a higher volume - so when you have a low velocity, you mainly hear this first part of the sound and not the low frequencies. The kick tone control will filter that out if you like…

Oh - also - play with the mono/poly control.  In mono mode you will definitely notice more of a harsh sound with the kick, because the kick will be cutting itself off and re-triggering - but that’s the way the original machine was designed. Switching to poly will get rid of this behavior, at the expense of faithfulness to the original sound :-)"

Cool!!

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moofi
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17 Mar 2015

Ah thank you, didn´t know about that mono/poly behaviour, then I actually couldn´t notice any difference between those two modes. Aswell in mono the attack differs on a 4/4.

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