Modular Monthly

Expressive drums with Entity from SSF

Eurorack has a wide range of drum modules, from clones of classics, to ‘drum voices’ which offer all the necessary components to create a wide range of drum sounds. We’ll be looking at the latter with Entity from SSF (Steady State Fate).

Entity calls itself a bass drum synthesizer, but that’s misleading as it can produce a range of drum tones. From Disco toms to thumping Techno basslines through bass drums to higher pitched ‘whoops’ and alien-like synth hits, Entity delivers through and through. The only thing missing is an onboard noise source which would give us snares, claps and cymbals.

An interesting control on Entity we haven’t seen on other modules is the body control, which emulates a resonating drum head. To the left it’s tight and less resonant, in the middle it’s a more tuned pitch and to the right it’s a loose flabby sound like a poorly tuned drum head. We’ve also got two audio inputs; F-Mix goes into the onboard resonant filter (ace for acidic synth lines) and the A-Mix goes into the output VCA which is the perfect place to add some noise for a further variety of sounds. There’s a wealth of inputs and outputs for controlling other modules and using voltages to manipulate Entity. It can be extremely expressive and in terms of sonic possibilities it’s vast!

We’ll be using Gatestorm for our drum sequencing which is a collaboration module between Erogenous Tones and SSF. It’s a powerful gate sequencer which will allow us to trigger Entity and also send out gates to modulation sources for moving percussion sounds.