Tag: drum
“Stealth” changes to Battlefield 2042 drum mags will be reverted
Some changes introduced to Battlefield 2042 in update 3.2 are being reverted following complaints from players, EA/DICE has announced. The longer aim-down-sights times for drum magazines and extended magazines, intended to balance these attachments and encourage other choices in the multiplayer game’s weapon loadouts, weren’t included in the official update 3.2 patch notes, and players weren’t crazy about them when they discovered them.
MORE FROM PCGAMESN: Battlefield 2042 review, Best multiplayer games on PC, Best FPS games on PC
GLIMMER MAN Appears During Native Lakota Drum Circle
A witness describes the appearance of a ‘Glimmer Man’ during a drum circle on the banks of the Missouri River in North Dakota. Some people believe that these are cloaked Bigfoot.
I received the following account from the witness several years ago:
“I’m writing you from North Dakota and I was intrigued when I saw the term “Glimmer Man” on your website. I had a similar encounter two summers ago in the area called Kimball Bottoms or as the locals call it “The Desert.” Anyway I was down there at a drum circle they were having and I don’t know if it was the drumming that attracted this thing or what. I was facing the water and banks of the Missouri River and it still being light outside (around 7pm in the summer) I could see everything clearly. I thought I saw a heat signature on the opposite bank, like heat rising off a hot parking lot in the summer). This stood out to me as I’d been staring in that area.
Anyway, zoning out as I went into an almost trance-like state due to the drumming, I started seeing this thing move. I stopped drumming and walked over to the edge of the bank. The more I watched the more I realized that this heat signature looked like it had arms and legs and was like swaying to the drumming still going on behind me. My friend came up and asked what I was looking at and as I pointed it out to her other people from the circle started to notice that we were pointing and staring at something across the river. More people stopped drumming and joined us at the bank. Some could see what we were seeing and others couldn’t. Eventually, nobody was drumming anymore and this “glimmer man” had stopped swaying and was watching us watch him. More than one person had mentioned that it looked like the invisible (yet visible) alien from the movie “Predator.” It was after maybe three mins of watching this “invisible being” (and yes many people tried taking pictures and video of it) only to not see anything when reviewing the images on their phones. Not surprising when you are trying to photograph a nearly invisible heat signature-looking thing).
At one point we could see this thing move back into the tall reeds and were surprised as the reeds parted. Those who didn’t see the being couldn’t help but see the reed part as it moved away. A few of us sat there for a good hour waiting to see if this invisible being came back, but we didn’t see anything. However many people freaked themselves out by talking about “where this entity could be?” Was it lurking in the water, walking along the shore, hiding in the trees, etc? I have to agree they all had viable points. It was a very surreal encounter and only deepened my beliefs on things existing in the folds of what we call reality.” JJ
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Have you had a sighting of a winged humanoid or huge bat-like creature in the Chicago, Illinois metro area / Lake Michigan region? The entity has also been referred to as the ‘Chicago Mothman’, ‘Chicago Owlman’ & ‘O’Hare Mothman’ or ‘O’Hare Batman.’ – Chicago / Lake Michigan Winged Humanoid Regional Interactive Map – Please feel free to contact me at lonstrickler@phantomsandmonsters.com – your anonymity is guaranteed. Our investigative group is conducting a serious examination of his phenomenon. We are merely seeking the truth and wish to determine what eyewitnesses have been encountering. Your cooperation is truly appreciated.
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The Official Hori Taiko no Tatsujin Drum Controller for Nintendo Switch Has Dropped to the Lowest Price Ever
Daily Deals for Nintendo Switch Gamers: Switch Online Membership, Memory Cards, Taiko No Tatsujin Drum Kit, Ring Fit, and More
Welcome to 2023! Switch gamers get first pick at deals with these great bargains. You can get a 1 year Nintendo Switch Family Membership plus a 256GB memory card for only $49.99, Ring Fit Adventure for only $55, or the officially licensed Taiko no Tatsujin Drum Kit from Hori for only $62.99. These deals and more below.
Nintendo Switch Online Family Membership and 256GB Memory Card
Amazon is offering a free officially licensed Nintendo Switch 256GB Micro SDXC memory Card when you pick up a 12 month Nintendo Switch Online Family Membership. Nintendo Switch Online lets you play online against other people in games like Super Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, or Splatoon 3, download custom levels in games like Super Mario Maker 2, play free retro SNES games, save your game data to the cloud, and much more. The “Family” membership allows for up to 8 different account holders, not necessarily in the same household. Split the price among your friends for even greater savings (and keep the memory card for yourself).
Samsung 512GB Micro SDXC Card (Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck Compatible) for $49.99
If you’ve started compiling a collection of digital games, you probably already know just how limited the Switch’s base storage capacity. With only 32GB of starting space (and some of it reserved for the OS), you’ll barely fit The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Pokemon Sword or Shield, which tap out at 13.5GB each! There’s only one expansion slot in the Switch console so you want to make sure you get the biggest card you can afford. The Samsung 512GB Micro SDXC card is fully compatible with the Switch and Steam Deck. Since this card boasts faster speeds than your standard Micro SDXC card (it’s rated for U3 A2 speeds), it also makes an excellent expansion card for your SLR camera, GoPro, or smartphone.
Ring Fit Adventure for Switch
Do you want to work out but simply don’t enjoy working out? Ring Fit Adventure is one way to get around this hurdle. Ring Fit incorporates a huge variety of excellent workout exercises disguised as an RPG game. An epic adventure awaits you slaying monsters and dragons, tackling new levels, traversing different environments, acquiring powerups and skills, all the while toning your abs and burning calories.
Official Taiko no Tatsujin Controller for Switch
Taiko no Tatsujin is an extremely fun and challenging drum rhythm game for the Nintendo Switch. The franchise is hugely successful and popular in Japan. There, it’s a common presence in arcade galleries where you’ll often see maestros performing superhuman combos on the highest difficulty levels. The Nintendo Switch game emulates this game in everything but its controls. Whereas in the arcade version you’re banging away on drumsticks, you’re relegated to using the button controls or the touchscreen interface in the Switch version. That’s where this officially licensed controller comes in. The Drum controller from Hori is a miniaturized copy of the arcade version. It’s responsive, it’s durable, and it will make Taiko no Tatsujin feel like a whole new (and far better) game.
No game is included so pick up the heavily discounted Taiko no Tatsujin Rhythm Festival game over at Amazon at the same time.
WD Black SN850X 2TB PS5 SSD for Only $199.99
The SN850X is one of the best SSDs you can buy for your PS5 upgrade. The SN850X is the successor to the SN850 SSD. It has newer flash chips (BiCS5 vs BiCS4) and an updated firmware, which combined offer improved sequential and random read/write speeds. For PC gamers, there’s also an updated Game Mode 2.0 utility that’s designed to tune the SSD for better performance during gaming sessions. It even includes a beefy preinstalled heatsink.
Anker 300W Portable Power Station Generator
Need plenty of juice while you’re out camping? This Anker portable power station will fit the bill quite nicely. Weighing in at only 10 pounds, this oversized power bank will give you 388.8Wh of power. In layman’s terms, it will charge an iPhone about 20 times, a MacBook Air 2020 about 5 times, or an iPad Air 11 times. There are several connectivity options, including a 60W USB-PD (Power Delivery) port and a 110V AC outlet.
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB M.2 PS5 SSD for $164.99
Crucial’s newest M.2 SSD meets all the requirements for your PS5 SSD upgrade. It supports transfer speeds of up to 6,660MB/s which is well above the 5,500MB/s minimum threshold. Yes there are faster SSDs out there, but if your intention is to put this in your PS5, then that extra speed is worthless because you’re bottlenecked by the original PS5 SSD. If you’re worried about opening up your PS5 case, don’t worry it’s very easy. Crucial has an official YouTube PS5 SSD install guide to see you through the process.
Bowflex SelectTech Adjustable Dumbbells for $379
Amazon has the best price on a pair of Bowflex SelectTech 552 adjustable dumbbells. Each dumbbell is adjustable from 5 pounds all the way to 52.5 pounds, or a total of 105 pounds for both dumbbells. This is a excellent practical gift for the muscleheads in your family.
Alienware Aurora R14 AMD Ryzen 7 5800X RTX 3080 Ti Gaming PC for $1999.99
There’s a $200 off coupon code that drops the price of this RTX 3080 Ti equipped gaming PC to under $2K. This PC will be able to push just about any game at 60fps+ speeds, even at 4K resolution. Sure, the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 video cards are more powerful, but they are also hundreds of dollars pricier and their performance is wasted on pretty much anyone who doesn’t run the absolutely most demanding games at 4K with raytracing enabled or VR gamers with 8K headsets.
PS5 God of War Bundle in Stock
The PlayStation 5 console is, thankfully, getting a little easier to find this holiday season. It’s still sold out at most places, but not all. Walmart has the PS5 Disc Edition console bundle with God of War: Ragnarok in stock right now. There’s no queue or invitations to wait for. No guarantees that they’ll stay in stock for much longer.
The Best Deals of the Week
These deals are definitely worth your attention.
Razzmatazz review: A delightful (and delightfully pink) drum machine
Earlier this year 1010music released the Lemondrop and Fireball, two surprisingly full-featured synths in unbelievably tiny packages. The company’s Nanobox lineup covers a lot of ground between those two instruments, but neither was particularly well suited to handling drums. So the company took the same core hardware, put a percussion-focused FM engine in it, along with a sampler, gave the whole thing a playful pink paint job, and dubbed it the Razzmatazz.
The latest member of the 1010music family is a rich sounding drum machine with a simple 64-step sequencer. While it may lack some modern amenities you’d expect from a $399 instrument, it makes up for it with a robust set of sound design features. And yes, even 10 months later, the Nanoboxes are still shockingly small.
Hardware
I won’t spend too much time rehashing the hardware since I’ve already covered it in my review of the Lemondrop and Fireball, but here’s a quick recap. The whole thing is 3.75 inches wide, 3 inches tall, and 1.5 inches thick – small enough to fit in even the tiniest of bags or a large pocket. There’s a two-inch touchscreen on the front, plus four navigation buttons and a pair of encoders. Around back you get ⅛-inch MIDI in and outs, ⅛-inch audio ins and outs, a USB-C port for power and a microSD slot (pre-populated with a 32GB card) for storing samples and presets.
The only notable exterior change from the previous Nanobox entries is the color. There’s no functional advantage to the Razzmatazz being hot pink, but I love it. As I mentioned in my review of Cre8Audio’s East Beast and West Pest, synths should be fun. I have nothing against the Korgs, Elektrons and Moogs of the world. But their instruments often take themselves quite seriously. And I, for one, think the synth world could use a splash of color now and then.
The Sound Engine
At the core of the Razzmatazz is an eight-voice engine that combines FM synthesis and sample playback. Each pad can be either or both, which is fairly unique. I can’t think of another affordable hardware drum machine that allows you to combine FM tones and samples in quite the same way. You can simply layer the two, but you could also, for example, use a sample of an actual timpani for the attack, then let the synth fade in after.
It’s a really fun effect and similar to what you find Roland’s late ‘80s Linear Arithmetic synthesizers like the D-50. The only issue is that figuring out how to achieve it isn’t immediately obvious. Since the two envelopes here are simple sustain / decay affairs, you can’t just soften the attack and be done with it. Instead you have to assign the envelope to control the volume of the digital oscillators, but set the mod depth to negative 100 percent, at which point the decay acts like the attack.
Another key difference is, the Razzmatazz can’t be played chromatically. So you can’t craft a room shaking bassline to accompany your drum pattern. You also can’t pull the trick of using the modulation sequencer to control pitch, like you could on the Lemondrop and Fireball. In fact, there is no modulation sequencer, just two LFOs and two envelopes. And pitch isn’t a modulation destination. You can change the tuning of individual pads and create something melodic that way, but that’s it.
The sounds themselves are excellent, though. The collection of 120 preset kits tend toward the glitchy and electro side of things. Since there’s a sampler, in addition to the FM engine, however, you can get convincing real drum sounds too. Most of the included samples don’t lean into the acoustic realm, but you can easily load or record your own if you like. The one thing to note is that there’s no way to chop up samples on the Razzmatazz. So if you want to slice up a breakbeat, you need to do that before you import it as separate files. Same for loops.
The top left-most pad has two special modes called Slicer and Clip. These allow you to get some of the benefits of chops and loops. But they’re a tad cumbersome and require some prep work. Slicer will playback bits and pieces of a sample, but you have to mark cue points using the company’s Blackbox or in software like Reaper or OcenAudio. Of course this is different from chopping up and rearranging a sample. Instead Slicer works its way through a full sample in a particular direction or jumps around randomly.
Clip mode is primarily for loops, but again, you need to trim up the sample beforehand. Make sure it’s a full number of bars and roughly within 20 BPM of the playback tempo. If you try to stretch it too far, or leave a bunch of dead air before or after, it may not deliver great results.
You also can’t just connect the drum machine to your computer via usb and transfer files. The USB-C port here is for power only. You’ll actually have to take the microSD card out and put it in a reader to move samples around. Frankly, that’s a little cumbersome for my tastes, and I usually preferred to just record directly to the Razzmatazz. You can’t trim or alter samples once they’ve been captured, but the threshold option at least means you won’t have a ton of silence at the start of a recording.
Interface
Unsurprisingly, the actual act of using the Razzmatazz isn’t all that different from using a Lemondrop or Fireball. You still get a UI organized by sections, and within each section are layers and then each layer has pages. It’s a little more work to find your way around the Razzmatazz because it has eight individual voices with their own set of parameters. And sound design is a bit more complicated because the synth engine is FM based, and FM is notoriously difficult to wrap your head around.
But credit to 1010music for trying to streamline things as much as possible. The first layer beneath each pad is a collection of eight macro controls. And from here you can also change the “model” of the pad to quickly dial in generic sounds for kicks, snares, toms, etcetera. These two things alone let you cover a decent amount of the basics. But you’ll definitely want to explore beyond there, to all the pages you can access from the pad dashboard. Here’s where you’ll find all your oscillator options, FX sends and modulation controls.
If you hold down the home button, though, you’re brought to the “Teleporter.” Here you can jump to almost any page or submenu you want with just a single tap. It’s a much faster way to navigate the UI. In general the Razzmatazz makes better use of the touchscreen than its predecessors. That’s partially just down to the kinds of machines they are. Tapping in sequences and playing one of eight reasonably sized touch pads just makes a lot more sense, than trying to play melodies on a grid of notes sized for a toddler.
Unfortunately, the X/Y macro mode from the Lemondrop and Fireball is gone. Your performance options are largely limited to playing the pads live, switching sequences and muting individual pads. Using the touchpad to control pattern-wide parameters, or engage a stutter effect would give it a lot more flexibility as a performance tool.
On the plus side, the sequencer is extremely straightforward. It lacks ratchets, microtiming, probability and almost any other modern amenity. But its simple TR-style makes it easy to quickly toss together patterns or alter them on the fly. The main sequencer page lets you swap between patterns, and the changes are tempo synced so you won’t awkwardly cut one off before its natural conclusion.
Wrap-up
The Razzmatazz is a welcome addition to the 1010music Nanobox family. Similar to its stablemates, the Fireball and Lemondrop, there is no direct competitor due to the depth of the sound engine and stunningly compact form factor. I’m unaware of any drum machine in the sub-$500 space that combines FM synthesis and sampling in the same way. And as far as I can tell, only Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators come close to being as pocketable. Of course, those offer less sound design options. But combine a Razzmatazz, Lemondrop and Fireball with a small mixer like the Bastl Dude or (if you like setting fire to money) the TE TX-6, and you’ve got yourself a portable music making rig that could fit in a couple of coat pockets.
There are a few features and changes, though, that seem like no-brainers and would greatly improve the usability of the Razzmatazz. Some form of basic sample editing, for instance, expanded sequencing features like ratchets, and performance-focused master effects would really elevate the instrument. Right now the Razzmatazz is a very good drum synth, but it’s potentially only a firmware update away from being a great one.
1010music’s Razzmatazz is a delightfully pink and pocketable drum machine
The Lemondrop and Fireball Nanobox grooveboxes pack a lot of punch for their size, and 1010music is expanding the lineup with the Razzmatazz drum machine. The pocket-sized device packs in a 64-step sequencer and eight drum voices. Each of the voices has two FM oscillators and a WAV sample layer, which should enable you to blend organic, acoustic and digital elements to create unique drum sounds.
Filters, resonators, bit-crushers, delay, reverb and four types of distortion can help you produce distinct sounds too. But if you’d rather not go through all that trouble, you can opt to use the Razzmatazz’s 120 preset kits and sequences instead.
You’ll be able to put together tracks with the help of eight drum and percussion pads, which you can control via the two-inch touchscreen or a MIDI device. Using the Super Stepper visual sequencer, 1010music says beatmakers can tap or swipe to create rhythms and simultaneously see all eight pads across 16 steps. You’ll be able to create lengthy drum sequences of up to 64 steps, each of which can last as long as eight bars. Along with the touchscreen, the groovebox has two knobs and four buttons.
The Razzmatazz is a proper sampler, since there’s a line-in jack through which you can record audio. Alternatively, you can load WAV files onto the device using a microSD card. There’s also a mode that enables you to play back loops or sample slices. However, there’s unfortunately no option to slice up samples on the device, which is powered through a USB-C connector.
Best of all, the Razzmatazz fits in with the candy-colored Nanobox aesthetic. It comes in an eye-catching hot pink. You can pick up the groovebox from the 1010music website and other retailers for $399.
Teenage Engineering and Love Hulten designed a drum machine ‘with heart disease’
Teenage Engineering’s latest drum machine probably isn’t one that you’re going to use to add percussion to your next piece. The company teamed up with designer Love Hulten to create CHD-4 in the aim of raising awareness about congenital heart disease.
The drum machine has four modules that produce rhythms based on the echocardiogram (ECG) scans of four children with heart defects. The scan results revealed the shape, pace and BPM of their heartbeats, Teenage Engineering said. It added the data to a four-track circular sequencer. The patterns can be played together or individually in order to create sounds that exemplify “each child’s irregular heartbeat.” A video gives a sense of the kinds of haunting soundscapes the machine can create:
“Drum machines are defined by order – beats, pace, and rhythm,” Hulten said. “This machine disrupts that system, the same way life is disrupted when a child is born with congenital heart disease.” The machine also has an OLED screen that depicts the audio and beat in a similar fashion to a proper ECG machine.
It’s an art project, no doubt, but it’s a fascinating one that’s raising awareness of an important issue. If you’re lucky, and have deep enough pockets, you might be able to add CHD–4 to your collection. It will be auctioned on Valentine’s Day (February 14th), with all proceeds going to the Swedish Heartchild Foundation.