Dragon (lite) Drum Machine

Akunull Systems

About this app

Dragon is a drum machine built to quickly and easily make glitch, distorted, lofi drum beats and manipulate them live. The drums are simple and flexible, capable of some classic drum machine sounds and also new weirdness. Each is synthesized in real time and sent to a multi effect rig with variable speed stutter, bit reduction, pitched feedback delay, down-sample, reverb, and a resonant bandpass filter. The drums are triggered by a four pattern step sequencer. Patterns can be changed individually for each drum or triggered together for quick pattern switches for all drums.

Features:
Four pattern sequencer with local and global pattern control
BPM control with nudging
Save/load presets
Record audio as wav
Three drum synths:
-Bass-similar to tr-808 with more consistent pitch
-Snare-similar to tr-909 with added fm and delay
-Hi-hat-two tones and noise with fm
Effects rig:
-Asymmetry and tanh(x) for tape like distortion
-Pitched feedback delay
-Retrigger (aka stutter/buffer) with variable speed and reversing
-Bit reduction
-Down-sample
-Reverb
-Resonant bandpass filter

Preset management and wav export requires permission for file storage read/write

Unpaid version disables preset saving and audio recording

Possible future ports to desktop and ios. Made with Pure Data and libGDX. Any questions, concerns, or creations, please contact

Full parameter and effect reference:

SYNTH PARAMETERS

Bass drum-
Freq: Frequency. Locks into semitones so you can harmonize easily
Decay: Amplitude decay
Freq Env Dec: Frequency envelope decay. Changes how fast the pitch drops
Freq Env Amt: Frequency envelope amount. Changes how much the pitch drops
Noise: Noise burst for click
Amp: Bass drum amp

Snare drum-
Tone Low Dec: Tone low decay
Tone High Dec: Tone high decay
Noise Dec: Noise decay
FM: Frequency modulate the low tone by the high tone
Freq: Frequency. Locks into semitones so you an harmonize easily, though fm and the high tone potentially bring inharmonic tones
Freq Env: Frequency envelope. Changes how much the pitch drops
Delay: Feedback delay
Delay ms: Milliseconds of delay
Tone Distance: Distance between low and high tones
Amp: Volume of snare

Hi-Hat-
Freq: Frequency
FM: Frequency modulate the tone
Tone Dec: Tone decay
Tone Amp: Tone amplitude
Noise Dec: Noise decay
Noise Amp: Tone amplitude

EFFECTS

Retrig: Loop audio by the specified time interval (bottom box) within the range of another time interval (top box)
Rev: reverse retrigger’s playback
Speed: control the speed of the retrigger’s playback

Bit Red: Bit reducer. Mixes in a low bit signal
BP Filt: Band-pass filter. All the way left is off
Tanh: Amplifies and the waveshapes the signal through a hyperbolic tangent curve. Creates a tape-like distortion
Asym: Adds to the signal, creating a DC offset. Needs Tanh turned a bit for a significant effect
Down Samp: Down-sample the signal
Reverb: Mixes in reverb signal
Delay: Pitched feedback delay dry/wet
Delay ms: Milliseconds of delay
Freq: Adjust the pitch that the delayed signal is adjusted by. Also locks into semitones (0-12)

Ratings and reviews

So sick, but...plz put a tap tempo Update: This is seriously my favorite drum machine app (not that my opinions matter), the whole "using it live" process behind it is genius, and I love the fact that you made it with PD...I wholeheartedly appreciate what your doing, and if you did just a standard synth doing subtractive synthesis, with your spin on it, I would probably geek so hard I would lose all my friends, but that would be ok...Seriously though, thanks for thinking this up!

The free app works on my Samsung Galaxy S8+, but the paid app doesn't. Please get this issue corrected.

Painful and noisy, might work for glitch music but nothing more IMO.

What's new

Update Android API to 33