Not yet an ARP owner, so please excuse my cluelessness. I saw instances of the ARP sending drum tracks and I wondered. The description of a 2023 video with ARP driving a Perkons drum synthesizer mentioned "The Arp is of course blind to what might make a pleasing drum pattern so it's a little bit chaotic at times but overall I think it's an interesting end result".
Does ARP have drum-specific features, or are drum tracks handled the same as any other ?
Is making drum track generation a special case a desirable feature, or is the universality of the ARP tracks a valuable doctrinal rule ?
Have ARP users found success in drum pattern generation beyond some extra percussion to spice up a regular drum track sequenced elsewhere ?
Hey that was my video with Perkons :) :)
I did that on an earlier version of the Arp firmware and since then there's been a lot of extra modulation "gradations" added. The pre and post mod features, the extra time signature options and MIDI CC make it way, way more friendly and flexible for drums.
I think the Arp would be perfect for someone who had a drum sound source but not an associated sequencer (like the 01/IV); or a multi-timbral synth being used as a drum machine; or for long evolving patterns with all sorts of interesting fills. But if you wanted it for a series of 10 3-minute pop songs I think there'd be many far simpler options.
Arp definitely has the capability to be used as a drum pattern generator but you'd need to do some detailed programming.
From a purely technical perspective... ARP isn't a drum machine, it is a MIDI sequence designer that can be used to trigger drum sounds. There's no dedicated "Drum Mode" as such but you can configure it to send a limited set of MIDI notes to a drum machine, groove box or sampler. A common setup, where you want to play drum pads would be to:
Lock the Note, Scale and Octave to match assigned MIDI notes of the drum triggers
Create a 16 step pattern using the Steps and Bounce parameters
Then, play with the other parameters to change how the sequence moves through that pattern
Assign modulators to change those patterns automatically
Assign macros to quickly shift the parameters and patterns in a live performance
If you want to program specific drum patterns you're better off using a step sequencer, which ARP is not (although Bounce takes you some way there). However, once you get your head into ARP's parametric approach you can make really interesting percussion patterns and use ARP's power to evolve and explore those patterns. As an ideas machine, its quite inspirational. Personally, I tend to use sliced beats. I might use a straight 4, 8 or 16 step bounce to run through slices sequentially, I then mess with the Steps, Repeat, Jump, Direction, Offset, Chop, Ratchet and Delay parameters to create variations. For example, drop the Steps to 1 and you'll get the first step repeated, then increase chop and you'll get it doubling the speed with each increase. Great for build ups or drills. Creating a modulation to control this, then assigning a macro to the Steps and Modulation Amount parameters creates pretty amazing effects. I should probably do a dedicated video on this topic.