Drumboy and Synthgirl by Randomwaves are a drum machine and a wavetable synth with colorful screens, touch control, and a hackable open-source architecture. Are they siblings? Are they lovers? We’ll leave that up to your imagination, but they do look like loads of fun.
Drumboy and Synthgirl: A Story of a Boy and a Girl
Randomwaves has launched Drumboy and Synthgirl on Kickstarter. The portable drum machine and wavetable synth look very similar and share a common hardware platform. Both have 5-inch color LCDs surrounded by capacitive touch controls. In a way, they remind me of portable gaming systems. If you’re already picturing yourself jamming away on your morning commute, however, keep in mind that you’ll need to bring a power bank, as they run on USB-C power and sadly don’t have internal batteries. A bit of a missed opportunity, in my opinion.
The hardware foundation is an ARM Cortex M7 microprocessor clocked at 550 MHz. The open-source firmware is built on the popular STM32 platform. In fact, the developers encourage you to hack them and implement your own ideas.
Randomwaves Drumboy
Drumboy is a drum machine with 10 tracks, each of which can play a sample of up to 8 seconds in length. For shaping the sound, there are two filters, a parametric EQ, two multi-effects, and a reverb. You can save up to 100 drum kits on an SD card.
The sequencer supports 8-bar patterns with a 1/64 note resolution, which gives you much more flexibility for building complex grooves than a traditional 32- or 64-step sequencer. There’s also a fill generator.
Randomwaves Synthgirl
While Drumboy is busy banging away on pots and pans, Synthgirl likes to play with her wavetables. The pocket-sized synth has two Serum-compatible 256-step wavetable oscillators. You can load your own wavetables via an SD card. There are four LFOs for modulation (two per oscillator). The rest of the signal chain looks very similar to Drumboy and includes an EQ, two filters, two multi-effects, and a reverb. In addition to a sequencer, Synthgirl has an arpeggiator.
Both have SD card slots for importing samples or wavetables and saving your own sounds and patterns. They also feature sync in/out and the developer says they’re working on adding MIDI in/out to the final production versions. There’s also an STM32 interface for manipulating the firmware to your heart’s content.
Price and Availability
The Kickstarter campaign launched a few days ago and runs until 29 October 2024. At the time of writing, a few early bird specials were still available for both Drumboy and Synthgirl at $149 each, although the early bird bundle was already sold out. The regular Kickstarter price is $159 apiece or $315 if you buy them as a pair. The manufacturer expects to begin shipping in February 2025.
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