Modor Music’s DR-2 OS012: Rumble, Filters and a Smarter Drum Machine

The new rumble kick model borrows a trick from techno production: it combines a punchy kick with a reverb tail that’s ducked by a compressor, ensuring the reverb doesn’t muddy the initial transient. This approach allows the main kick to cut through cleanly, while the reverb tail blooms afterwards—evoking the cavernous feel of a large club or hall without sacrificing clarity.

Modor’s implementation goes further by low-pass filtering the reverb tail, keeping it sonically distinct from the rest of the mix. The result is a deep, weighty kick that maintains its presence even in dense arrangements. This model is clearly aimed at those who want their drums to fill the room without overwhelming the groove, and the video demonstrates how the DR-2’s digital architecture makes this possible with just a few parameter tweaks.

The filter claps and filter hi-hats models both introduce adjustable filter slopes, giving users detailed control over the frequency content of their percussion. For the claps, the filter offers a gentle slope at the low end and an impressively steep low-pass filter—up to 96 dB/octave—at the top, effectively silencing anything above the cutoff. This is applied to a wide noise source, allowing for handclap sounds that range from naturalistic to highly sculpted, depending on the settings.

The filter hi-hats take this concept further, with filter slopes up to 84 dB/octave available on both low-pass and high-pass filters. Users can blend cymbal noise with pink noise and adjust the separation between the filter cutoffs, resulting in hi-hat and cymbal sounds that are intentionally synthetic and edgy. Modor makes it clear that realism isn’t the goal here; instead, these models are about creative control and new timbral territory.

The new parametric equalisation stage is found in the after-treatment section of the DR-2, positioned between the distortion and tilt filter. Each of the six instrument slots gets its own EQ, allowing for per-voice frequency shaping. The video highlights how this is especially useful for kick drums, where cutting a specific lower-mid frequency range can add punch and clarity.

Rather than limiting this feature to the rumble kick, Modor has made the EQ available to all drum models. With adjustable centre frequency, Q factor, and a generous gain range from -36 to +36 dB, this stage provides the kind of surgical control usually reserved for studio outboard gear. The result is a drum machine that not only generates a wide palette of sounds, but also lets users refine and polish each voice to fit their mix.