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.