Netlist Drum Computer
1024 pages of bad intentions. Bruxer's bigger nastier brother.
Bruxer's eight voices, every part a real component, played by a song of up to 1,024 one-bar pages in sixty-fourth notes. A note can carry its own effects, its own odds, its own place left or right and its own settings, and the note after it never hears them. Eight LFOs reach any knob on any voice, and a bounce solves the parts.
VST®3 instrument · Windows 64-bit No activationmacOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
What it is
FROM BRUXER
FROM DROPFORGE
Then a page of 8 LFOs, with a chip under every voice knob to give it one. With no effects on, every board plays exactly as it does in Bruxer, which is free: the drums are all there, and Mandible gives them a song to be written into.
Hear it
Made on the instrument, and put here as they came: their levels untouched, and no limiter on any of them.
WRITE
WRITE is for the song: THE SONG along the top, a page in miniature for every bar, and the page you pick open under it to write on, 64 steps across and 18 lanes down. SHAPE, the key beside it, is for the sounds.
6 effects, note by note
A note lasts from its drum's trigger to the next one. Switch an effect on for a step, and the notes struck on it have it from their first sample; what it made of them rings on after them, and the next note never goes in. CRUSH, REDUCE, PITCH and STRETCH work on the note itself. DELAY and REVERB are sends, and their returns go back into Bruxer's bus beside the drums, so SQUASH, HEAT and the sagging rails work on the tails too. The drums are real components, solved; the six effects are digital algorithms, and are called that here.
CRUSH The note rounded to two to the power of BITS levels across full scale, from sixteen bits down to one. BITS
The arithmetic
1,024pages64steps a page
A page is a bar, and every step of every page has its own 18 lanes: which of the eight drums it strikes and at which level, which effects they carry, where they are thrown, the odds they play, and what the two lock lanes hold. Over them, the automation rows run across the pages at lengths of their own.
Bruxer's boards, in SHAPE
The voices are Bruxer's own, board for board, every part a real component, each with a tooth stage of its own. In SHAPE, THE CONSOLE has a strip for each, with its fader, its pan, M and S, and a click opens its page under it: its SOUND from any of the 5 kits, its trigger note, MUTE, SOLO and OWN OUT, every knob on its board in cards with a chip under each for an LFO, and LAST STRIKE, the voice's last hit drawn whole with its trigger's height.
KICK A state-variable oscillator on two OTAs, swept down by its own pitch envelope, its attack folded in diode stages and driven into a triode, or into a fuzz with TOOTH on FUZZ.
Beside the drums, in SHAPE
THE CONSOLE has two strips that are not drums. LFO opens a page of 8 LFOs, and every voice knob has a chip under it to take one. FX opens DRUMS FX, the effects' knobs in one place, with the song's use of each.
LFOS
And the rest of it
FIVE LEVELS
Try it here: each click steps a note up through the five levels and back to nothing, as the panel does.
BITE
Every hit is a voltage pulse, and BITE sets how far the softer levels' pulses fall below 10 V. The pulse's height is everything the hit does, so a soft note is a smaller, cleaner hit, and a hard one drives every tooth stage harder. At the kits' 0.60:
ADVANCED
Click a step on the ADVANCED lane, or a step's number over the page, and THE STEP opens in a drawer beside it. NOTE CHANCE and EFFECT CHANCE set the odds that its notes play and that their effects do. REVERSE plays the note backward from its step, swelling into its drum's next note, for up to two seconds; FADE, on DRUMS FX, brings it in from its quiet end. STRETCH plays it twice as long at its own pitch. FORCE CHOKE cuts it the moment the next sixty-fourth arrives.
FRAG
GENERATE's third tab: a library of written fragments in 24 families, from one eighth to a whole bar. Pick one and drop it into the page at any eighth that fits, over what is there or in its place, and hear it in the song before you keep it. A fragment's toms fall across the three toms by register.
CRATE
GENERATE's fourth tab has two shelves: THUMP, the grooves Bruxer carries from this site's library, and PHONON, Phonon's patterns with their toms, congas, bongos and timbales laid across the three toms by register. Pick a family, pick one, and it lands in green at its own tempo and swing, ready to keep and draw on.
LOCK 1, LOCK 2 AND THE ROWS
Click a lock lane's name and pick its control: a voice's knob, the toms' shared ones, the bus's or an effect's. Each step can hold its own value. A lock takes hold at the hit, as Bruxer's do, and lets go after it. + AUTOMATION ROW draws any of the same controls across the pages, each row going round at a length of its own.
PAN
Every note on a PAN step but the kick goes left or right by up to 50 degrees. The throw comes from the song's position, so the same song throws the same way every time.
THE RAILS
Every voice and the bus's monitor amplifier hang off the same rails. A loud kit pulls them down, and while they are down every pitch in the kit goes flat and every voice loses a little headroom. SAG on the bus's page says how far they give, and READINGS shows them giving as the song plays.
MIDI AND OUTPUTS
The drums answer the GM drum notes, 36 for the kick to 39 for the clap, on any channel. Eight stereo outputs: the mix, and one each for the kick, the snare, the hats, the three toms and the clap. OWN OUT, on a voice's page, sends it to its own.
NETLIST
While you play, Mandible runs Bruxer's boards as equations, about half of one core on the default song. With BOUNCE on NETLIST an offline render solves the boards and the bus, part by part, about twelve times slower than real time; LIVE plays the equations. Both are 56 samples late at 44.1 and 48 kHz. If the netlist fails mid-render the live boards carry the rest and the fault is logged. A reversed or stretched note plays as live plays it, in either.
YOURS
No license server, and no phone-home. Bruxer's five kits to start from, Default Tooth, Clean Bite, Full Bruxism, Crushed Metal and Tension Toms, and any voice's SOUND from any of them. 199 parameters, every one automatable but BOUNCE.
At a glance
| Format | VST®3 instrument · Windows 64-bit |
|---|---|
| In development | macOS VST3 and Audio Unit |
| Requires | 64-bit Windows 11, in any version Microsoft still supports. When the Mac version ships: macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. |
| Voices | 8 · kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, low, mid and high tom, clap · Bruxer's boards |
| The circuit | Bruxer's original analog circuit, every part a component · the boards, their shared rails and the bus |
| The song | Up to 1,024 one-bar pages · 64 steps a page, a sixty-fourth note a step |
| Lanes | 18 · 8 of notes at 5 levels, 6 of effects, PAN, ADVANCED, 2 locks |
| Levels | BITE: the trigger's height · at 0.60, level 1 fires 6.1 V and level 5 10 V |
| Effects | Crush, reduce, pitch and stretch on the note · a sixteenth-note delay and a Freeverb, sent into the bus · digital algorithms |
| ADVANCED | Note chance, effect chance, reverse, stretch, force choke · step by step |
| Locks | 2 lanes, each any control · automation rows on THE SONG |
| PAN | Every note but the kick, thrown up to 50 degrees either way |
| LFOs | 8 · 7 shapes · SYNC from 1/64 to 8 bars or FREE from 0.02 to 40 Hz · on any of 107 voice knobs |
| Bus | Sag on the shared rails · Squash, a log-domain compressor · Heat, a triode each side · Master |
| Generators | FILL, FILIGREE, FRAG's 241 fragments · THE CRATE: Thump's grooves and Phonon's patterns |
| MIDI | Drum notes 36, 38, 42, 46, 43, 47, 50 and 39, any channel |
| Outputs | 8 stereo · the mix, and one each for the kick, the snare, the hats, the three toms and the clap |
| Kits | Default Tooth, Clean Bite, Full Bruxism, Crushed Metal, Tension Toms · any voice's sound from any of the five |
| Playback | Bruxer's boards as equations · about half of one core on the default song |
| Bounce | BOUNCE NETLIST: the parts and the bus, solved · LIVE: the equations |
| Bounce time | About twelve times slower than real time on the default song |
| Latency | 56 samples at 44.1 and 48 kHz, the same in playback and the bounce |
| Parameters | 199 published, all automatable but BOUNCE |
| The panel | 1680 by 960 · WRITE and SHAPE |
| Validation | 47 of 47 validator tests · host-tested |
| Activation | None. No license server, no phone-home |
| Security updates | Until November 2031 |
| License | License agreement · Facts sheet |
VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.
