This year Nord announced the imminent release of a new percussion synthesizer called Nord Drum 3 (which will be released along with Nord Drum 3P). The red box comprised a few new features: the effects of reverb and delay, as well as a set of sound banks.

Factory banks include 200 presets, and 400 custom ones. In the library you can find: kicks, snares, toms, bells, cymbals, hi-hats, claps, etc. The interface hasn’t changed much, the same sections featured in Nord Drum 2 were kept.

"Tone" section is responsible for the creation of harmonically complex waveforms, which are generated using three types of synthesis - resonant, subtractive, and frequency modulation (FM). Resonance synthesis offers a large selection of exotic sounds, like marimba, vibraphones and cymbals. The subtractive method has standard sawtooth, sine, meander waveforms for synthesizing, and frequency modulation has 6 different FM algorithms, where frequency parameters are controlled by an exclusive "Spectra" knob. "Click" adds a click to the attack, and "Noise”, as the name implies, - synthesizes noises.

For each unit (Click, Tone, Noise) an individual dynamic filter is provided: LPF (low-pass), HPF (high-pass), and BPF (band-pass) directly interacting with the velocity. All 6 channels of the instrument have their own effects - distortion, equalizer and repeat. Among the master effects there are reverb and delay available, which can also be assigned to any channel. The device has a headphone output (1/8), MIDI In/Out, and 6 common inputs for connecting to electronic, acoustic drums, etc.

Tags: digital synthesizer