Sonic Potions present The ‘LXR Drumsynthesiser’ – DIY Kit Build

All about the DIY instrument-build approach at the moment, and proper looking forward to dedicating some time to this next month. Sonic Potions are filling a very necessary need for drum synth kits with the release of the LXR Drumsynthesizer this week. And while it’s hard to judge gear until you’ve had some hands-on experience with it, we thought it’d be necessary to give this beauty a shout out ahead of the shop going live tomorrow, as these things are set to fly.

Sonic Potions is in fact one chap in a workshop in Germany, named Julian Schmidt, who, over the course of the two year development of this machine has had a connoisseur’s online community rise up around him. The whole project is done open source, lots of feedback and testing from those anxious yo get their hands on one.

The site’s pretty slick and well maintained, a nice feature for fans of gear-porn being the photos  especially in development stage. Worth swinging by the forums on the site for some DIY heads advice and drum machine wish list ideas you may have never thought of: http://www.sonic-potions.com/

On to the machine itself. Check a sample video below and feature list underneath that.

via Sonic Potions

The LXR is a digital drum synthesizer. We sell it as a DIY kit, so you will have to build it yourself.
For detailed information about the synth have a look at the owners manual (pdf ~1MB)

Some of the features are
Cortex M4 based
6 voices (VA and FM)
7 sequencer tracks (extra open HH channel)
44kHz / 16 bit audio
4 mono outputs
4 different instrument engines
1/128 step pattern resolution
USB/Din Midi
different lengths for each track
8 chainable patterns per preset
Step probability
SD-Card
Cowbells!
39 buttons
6 LFOs routable to every voice parameter
complete kit. comes with all needed parts for assembly
No SMD soldering required
open source
All! actions possible without stopping the sequencer playback

On top of the fact that the LXR seems to sound decent and looks good, I really dig the idea of playing machines that I in someway built with my own hands. For those wanting to check more about the machine before getting excited about ordering you can get the PDF user manual here.

Big ups all involved, proper excited about this release tomorrow.