drums in the deep

20 HP · drums

Drums, coming up from below. A drum voice that's mostly about where the drums are: far down in the deep they're dull, late and lost in the hall; at the door they're dry, huge and on the beat. Drop something down the well and they come up.

The DRUMS IN THE DEEP panel: black, with a stone doorway in gold dots. Inside it a shaft of small windows of bare circuit board: a door at the top and twenty-four rows of three under it, narrowing as they go down. DISTANCE, a big knob, under the shaft, the WELL button below it, CV and WELL either side. Down the left CLOCK, DRUMMERS, TUNE, BEAT and OUT L; down the right HIT, DEPTH, LENGTH, DOOR and OUT R. drums in the deep at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. WELL is a button to press: click or tap it, or press Space or Enter on it. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

The drums, the well, the hall and the lights are DRUMS IN THE DEEP's own. The pad and the bass round them are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The drums, their distance, the hall, the well and every out here are DRUMS IN THE DEEP's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The pad and the bass are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

Distance

Each hit is heard as it would be from where it was struck. Sound takes time to come up through the stone, about a second for every 343 m, so far drums land behind the clock, and as they come up the beat runs ahead of it until it's on it. Far down they're dull, thin, narrow and mostly echo; near, they're full, wide and dry.

The drums

Big low skins in three sizes, and iron on the accents once they're close. The beat writes itself from how near they are: single slow hits at the bottom, then twice as many, then every beat, a march, and at the door a roll. Each drummer has his own skin, his own lean behind the beat and his own place across the doorway, so many of them flam and roll like a crowd.

The deep

The drums are in a stone hall, and you hear them through it. Its echo doesn't fade with distance the way the drums do, so the further down they are, the more of what reaches you is the hall.

The well

Press WELL and the drums stop. Something drops down a stone shaft and clatters a long way, each knock further down, later and darker, taking as long to fall as it really would. It lands. On the next bar one drum answers from the bottom of the deep. Then they come up, more of them as they come, and the shaft's windows show them climbing until they're at the door.