AvailableInstrument

Tetra Box

A sixteen-pad drum machine whose whole kit morphs across three faces at once.

@maru shared this instrument so you can play it in your DAW, remix it or put it on your site.

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What it does

A sixteen-pad drum sampler where the whole kit morphs at once. Every pad holds three versions of its sound, and one triangle control moves all sixteen pads between those three faces together.

The idea

A morphing sampler usually morphs one sound. Tetra Box morphs a kit. The three corners of every pad are aligned across the machine: corner one of the kick, the snare and the hat all belong to the same theme. Because the corners agree, one position on the triangle means the same thing for every pad, and dragging it walks the whole kit from one coherent character to another.

These are one-shots, so moving the triangle does not bend a hit that is already ringing. It changes what the next strike plays.

Guide and controls

How it works.

A strike arrives from a pad click, a keyboard row or MIDI in, with velocity taken from how high up the pad it landed. The pad's global morph point resolves to a lattice cell: up to three clips with barycentric weights.

One buffer source starts per loaded layer, each behind a gain carrying its equal-power blend weight times velocity squared times the pad's own gain. Vary, when it is up, wanders the strike point inside a radius around the morph position, so repeats select different neighbouring material rather than just jittering in level.

The pad's voice policy decides what happens to anything already sounding there, and the choke table cuts across pads independently. Decay trims each one-shot's tail as a fraction of its rendered length.

The three theme backdrops crossfade behind the translucent face on the same weights the sound is using, with the kit's declared canvas animation running underneath.

What would you make with Tetra Box?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Part of Tetra Box rack, Upes, Drumstep + Tetra Box rack

Goes well with.

Prototype

A sample-free drum synth with ten circuits and sixteen steps.