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Every month, I dig up my favorite recently discovered module and write about what I think is cool about said module. This month I’m focused on my newest and most exciting module, ALM’s Dinky’s Taiko.

I’ve been in the market for a very flexible drum module for as long as I’ve been building a eurorack modular system. I’ve had my eyes on the Noise Engineering Basimilus Iteritas for a while, but felt all of the demos were a little too “dark” and industrial sounding for the type of music I tend to make. When ALM’s new Dinky’s Taiko came out, I was very intrigued– here was another very flexible alm005-680hpercussion module with lot’s of CV control, and with a slightly “lighter” and more IDM sound to it. I had a hard time deciding between the B.I. and Dinky’s and in the end mostly went with with the ALM module because of the included choke and accent inputs.

After hooking up my new Dinky’s Taiko — learning the quirks (CV is “snapshotted per trigger, CV is added to the knobs and not attenuated, etc), I’m impressed by the range and flexibility of percussive and even pitched sounds one can get out of this module with very little work. If you are considering a Dinky’s Taiko, I’d recommend adding some sort of attenuator to your system– I really like subtle changes in my drum parts and found I couldn’t get them right without attenuating my CV signals.

For the purposes of this post, I decided to quickly try to make some kick and snare drums, as well as a few hi-hats and cymbals. I also recorded a few jams with a couple of patches. For these patches, I sequenced the Trigger, Accent, and Choke inputs with a combination of the MFB SEQ-02 and the Pittsburgh Modular Timetable. Mostly, I sent the SEQ-02 output into the Timetable, and then mixed the triggers coming out of both using the Sythrotek MST Stereo-Out Mixer. The mixed triggers went into the trigger input on the Dinky’s and “off” outputs from the Timetable were used for accent and gate. Parameters on the Dinky’s were modulated by the Blue Lantern Simple Digital ADSR, an Expert Sleepers Disting, and a Mutable instruments Tides. All of these CV sources were using my Blue Lantern Level Fixit which is a 7 channel passive attenuator.

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This module is great for complex/random sounding glitch beats and strange percussive sounds. It’s also incredibly digital sounding and not for anyone who is interested in emulating traditional synthesized drums. I believe I haven’t spent nearly enough time with it to learn the full range of this module, but I’d imagine there are many new and interesting percussion sounds hidden inside of this 12 hp module.

Here are some quick drum sounds– feel free to download and use these if you’d like. You can even use them with your QuNeo or QuNexus ;-).

Here are a few simple patches made with Dinky’s Taiko. With the exception of the kick drum on Jam 3 (Blue Lantern Asteroid BD v4), everything was synthesized using the ALM Dinky’s Taiko.