Having teased it earlier this year, former Teenage Engineering and Ableton staffers Svante Stadler and Rikard Jönsson - now operating as a new company called Forever 89 - have released their first product, a sample-modelling drum machine known as Visco.
This is designed for “fluid and fast transformations of any drum sound,” and can model any sample you feed it. As such, it promises to “free you from the usual limitations of working with recorded audio.”
Whichever method you use to design your drum sounds - sampling or synthesis - there are pros and cons, but Visco is designed to give you the benefits of both. We’re promised the speed that comes with using existing audio, plus an easy workflow that simplifies the synthesising process.
This is thanks to the blob, a malleable 2D representation of your sound that appears in the middle of Visco’s interface. This can be grabbed, pushed and pulled using a variety of tools, giving you a tactile, intuitive way of making realtime tweaks.
Thanks to the blob, you can bend and stretch samples across frequency and time, merge the qualities of two samples and fine-tune your sounds to fit your mix. Every sound can use a mixture of two samples, and as well as blending them, you can also create sounds that start with one sample and end with the other.
Visco isn’t just a drum sound designer, though - it also enables you to sequence its eight voices, and has its own beat generator to provide instant inspiration. There’s a mixer and effects section, plus a set of performance-friendly macro controls that are designed for live use. Don’t worry if you don’t want to use your own samples, either, as a preset and sound library is included, too.
Forever 89 describes Visco as “a novel, capable, and playful way to engage with creative sound design and performance to make your music sound more like you.”
Visco is available now for the introductory price of $99 (regular price €139) and runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU formats. Find out more on the Forever 89 website.
