Arturia DrumBrute Impact Noir

Hands-on, easy to get into, but with surprising depth

The Impact is a full-featured machine that requires you to get hands-on with your beats and tweaks. The basics are easy and quick to grasp, but when you get into the more subtle features like polymeters, probabilities, randomization, step shift timing - you can easily do triplets within 4/4 beats - and unquantized recording you'll find out how versatile the Impact really is. The only feature I miss is MIDI control of the instrument parameters - the Impact is truly hands-on - to tweak the sounds in real time you'll need to work the knobs. There's plenty of features geared towards live manipulation like per-instrument ratchets, pattern part repeats and per-instrument/full-pattern randomness to keep things interesting, but you'll have your hands full, which may or may not be a bad thing. The Impact is great with a very decent price point, and the manual has everything you need to get started and get deep. If you're into hands-on beat creation and knob tweaking, the Impact has you covered.