My Synth Does WHAT? More Easter Eggs! Pt.3

We've covered synth easter eggs before; hidden modes and features - obscured to delight synth owners or even gently "hold back" features that weren't quite ready for prime time. Today, we're going to start our look at some less obvious, but very useful features.

Gaming on the Korg Drumlogue

A bit of fun to start; Korg's Drum machine has a hidden platform game! See it in action here:

My Drumlogue is a Synth?

But now onto the truly useful stuff - the Korg's drum machine is actually a synth, and not just any synth - one of the wildest synths I've ever used. Korg's drum machine originally shipped with:

• Analogue Kick, Snare, Low Tom & High Tom (I really love the kick!)
• 6 Sample-based parts (which were a little limited - although you can modulate sample start and sample rate, the samples aren't very long and fade out)
• 1 Multi-engine part with two included monosynths: a 2OP VPM instrument and Nano - a pretty nice sounding VA.

So then, pretty varied sound design options in the stock unit - but it didn't take long before custom User Multi-Engine algorithms blew the instrument wide open. Find out more on developing custom Drumlogue synths/effects here:

https://www.korg.com/uk/products/drums/drumlogue/sdk.php

By the time I'd made my deep dive video in 2024, we'd already seen many wild new developments - I'll list a few:

• Boochow's Delay Lab (A very nice modulated delay with audio-rate LFO's!)
• Dukesrg's Loguepads (Sample playback - including longer samples!)
• Dukesrg's Tesseract Vector Synth
• Dukesrg's FM64 (A 6OP FM synthesizer that imports Dexed patches and custom waveforms!)

Back then (and even now!) FM64 made the Drumlogue a forever synth for me...not only can you load in Dexed/DX7 patches, but you can also tweak loads of parameters like modulator & carrier frequency/amplitude, feedback, algorithm and waveform. The last of these is truly special. You can import essentially any short wave to become the operators in this synth; even short PCM samples if you follow this recipe:

• Use perfectly-looped 32768 sample waveforms (I used a bow-tie loop to make them smooth),
• Use specially-made Dexed patches, with the transpose parameter and operator ratios set to their lowest possible pitches (otherwise the waveforms will play too high/fast),
• Use midi controller that transposes down at least 3 octaves.

With 4 voices, FM64 has enough to create polyphonic sequences with plenty of automation! You'll hear my polyphonic experiments towards the end of the above video. Drumlogue could have stopped there (a classic in my eyes) - but the user algos kept coming!

2024 onward

The last two years have produced a bag of goodies like:

• Boochow's Lillian (It's Mutable Instrument's Braids in your Drumlogue!)
• Frostmod Audio's Riffline (A 4 Voice SuperSaw synth)
• Ylmrx's Maxisynth SVF (A two oscillator and SVF filter synth for the Drumlogue)
• Ylmrx's Poutou Shaper - (A waveshaper/saturator for the Drumlogue so you can go super loud)
• Ylmrx's Snh - (Sample+hold (as a delay FX) for the Korg Drumlogue)

As amazing as these are, nothing prepared us for the Drumlogue's next chapter...

Pure Data on Drumlogue

This month, Boochow released a number of new Drumlogue units - and announced a free online converter that turns Pure Data patches into Drumlogue instruments and effects! This is huge in terms of accessibility, because until now - you've had to know how to code in C. Pure Data is still no cakewalk - for instance, envelopes are created by using basic lines and delays, there's a bunch of * and ~ symbols everywhere (I'll let you figure that out on your own!) and it's not exactly pretty to look at - but, it's the kind of thing that an systems-focused tinkerer can figure out in an afternoon, not a year.

I've already made my first patch, a nasty exponential FM drum - so wish me luck with the conversion!

So that concludes my little update on the Drumlogue, wherever will we go next?

Korg Social

• 5 Minutes With: Korg OPSIX 08-Oct-26
• LA Studio Drums For KORG Module 01-Oct-26
• Free Custom Firmware For The Volca Drum 20-Aug-26
• SonicLAB: Korg Nu:Tekt NTS-4 Performance Mixer 03-Aug-26
• Grammy Winner's Piano Sounds For Kronos 23-Jul-26