I see. I can’t compare as I haven’t tried Lyra8 (and I’m trying to stay away as I have the pieces I want for now). I will check it out next year if I’m feeling brave. If I understand it correctly, isn’t Lyra8 made to only use internal modulation? I saw a an IG story with an interesting DIY to add external modulation by way of the sensors.
Internal modulation options are slim, but I do find it interesting the different ways to work around that limitation with piggy-backing clips/pins, clock dividers, inversion and attenuators. Then there’s the external option. It gets messy quickly but I’m still enjoying it.
I think you’ll like it if you like to experiment and don’t care about the permanence of your kits and patterns. However, the workflow is really slow. Or maybe I only feel that way now that I have a Perkons, which is lightning fast to work with (no pun intended). Like modular, it takes time to get somewhere stable, but a lot of the fun is the journey there and the weird accidents you’ll hear along the way. Its a lot of fun integrating it with modular, and it really is organismic in that it’ll just blend in and turn into something else when you start doing so.
At the end of the day, you just have to ask yourself what you really want. All the drum machines you’ve thought of are completely different, with different pros and cons. Pulsar, great with modular, experimental, can do basic sounds, but really shines with performance and noise. Syntakt, modern but keeps the classic elektron workflow, for the most part? Analog rytm, drum pads, sampling (though pulsar sort of can sample too), and a wide range of tonal capabilities. So I think you might just need to hammer out what you actually want in your set up and then it’ll be easier to decide.
I’ve never owned a Pulsar, but I’ve always been an admirer. My own reasons for not buying one include the crocodile clips not vibing with the arthritis in my hands.
I think you have to like the sound of it, don’t listen to a bunch of it on the internet, then tell yourself you can make it sound like x or y because whatever. It sounds how it sounds and you either like that or you don’t.
If you like the way it sounds and don’t mind the obvious interface and modulation/CV limitations, I’d say you’ll probably like it.
It doesn’t all have to be cable spaghetti and crazy patching, Surgeon (sorry, fanboy alert) uses one live pretty extensively and he’s rarely got more than about five or six cables connected. He swears by the sound of the kick on big systems, and he should know a thing or two about that.
I think why I gassed for it so much initially was because it was like a Eurorack drum machine playground that cost quite a bit less than I would have spent to build in Eurorack. To build this in Eurorack would be over $3,000: four separate drum modules (so I can have all that control per module), clock module, looper module, LFO module, delay/reverb modules, distortion module, S&H module, mult module, a case, and a mixer. Plus this looks a lot more ergonomic than Eurorack, which tends to be a cramped mess. The more I watch videos of it, the more I like the built-in looper.
If your modular system is Eurorack then you could dip your toe in with the Soma Lyra FX module. The drive and delay circuits will give you an idea of whether you enjoy the Soma “sound” . It will also show you how batshit crazy their devices can get because for me I can’t get enough of it.
I just wrote some stuff about Pulsar and tried to explain how flexible and special piece of gear it is. But then I’ve noticed that it was a bit too positive for this thread and deleted it. So I’ll try another shot and just want to say that it was really annoying to have an awful click especially when modulating the lfo or mad pin. Soma says that clicks and pops are normal with volumes all the way down as it’s inherent to the analog design but to be honest I don’t buy that. I’ve been using different analog devices for a while and getting those annoying clicks only from Pulsar.
But yeah, still… it is special… things like audio rate modulations, feedback patching are really fun… I learned much about different patching and routing strategies thanks to it. With a little feedback patching you can get really complex modulations. But some more utilities would be always great for sure. Actually they were working on some utilities for Pulsar but don’t know much details.
…i was in shock love the moment i heard the first few sounds from that russian sonic tank…
had no 2000 bux to spent easily that time to just get one right away…
later on, i knew, it would have driven me crazy, since it’s so endless in pretty unpredictable manipulation ways…
got me an enner instead a few month later…has some of it’s flavour, some of it’s vibe, but not even close, end of the day…
an ot and a pulsar…?..heavy shit…can’t argue…
but be aware of the fact, that once u start to shortcut it, u cross the border to eternity of beautyful noises of more than just all kinds, totally unpredictable, everchanging and apart from heavy use of heaps of messing with cables u also never ever really can repeat any of all this in another live situation, even getting close in some soma same way…no chance…
so there is lot’s of bliss and lot’s of frustration waiting for u…
and u better also become a total pro in handling ot’s live recording buffers and how to save at least some of all that glory mess for later…
Couldn’t have said it better myself. The Pulsar-23 is a work of art, meticulously designed inside and out. I had so many ‘wow’ moments when reading the manual, it was like Vlad knew what I wanted to do with it before I did. I’m not into Eurorack and had no idea what most of the pins actually did, but I loved connecting things up randomly and seeing what happened. I love that the bass and perc module can be played chromatically with an external controller. It has a deep, ragged, organic sound like nothing else out there.
And as for it being only useful for edgy industrial techno, that’s just incorrect.
Thank you. Nice video. I’ve already seen it. But still in doubt… All the reasons wrote above are right in each aspect… So I started to talk myself out too. Octatrack+ Syntakt+ LXR-02 … Current alternative…
completely agree re: limitations. I can probably see why you apply this to soma’s products, as they are more like traditional instruments in a way. and I agree each of them has a certain sound (but not that all of them have one ‘soma sound’, I can’t see such thing).
but it’s been a long time since a guitar or a flute was considered experimental or novel. if that’s not important to a buyer, no problem. but their marketing sells just that.
re: their marketing, I’d say that Vlad’s approach is different to many, as he authored a book, organises entire retreats (to use an esotericists’ term), etc
and bit offtopic, to pinch those who flagged me out again: somehow this esoteric marketing allowed them to issue a Pulsar edition in a military bag when the war was already full on. talk about flags.
