Vermona doesn’t ship a new machine every month, so when the Saxon workshop announces one, it’s worth paying attention. The drumDING, now open for pre-order, absolutely earns that attention: this hybrid drum machine doesn’t simply stack fixed analog voices, it proposes a way of building electronic rhythm we haven’t seen stated this clearly in a while.
One analog voice, endlessly shapeable
The drumDING breaks with analog-drum orthodoxy. Instead of wiring one circuit for the kick, another for the snare, a third for cymbals, Vermona gives you a single analog percussion voice built to cover an entire kit. It carries the DNA of the DRM-1, the company’s own drum synth, pushed toward greater flexibility.
That voice is built around a dual-range oscillator with its own pitch envelope and a wave knob sweeping from sine to square. A second, routable oscillator adds FM, while a resonant filter blends continuously from low-pass to band-pass to high-pass. You can move from a round, deep kick to a metallic hat or a noisy percussion hit without ever leaving the analog domain.
The core move: shape, then sample
This is where the drumDING becomes genuinely distinctive. Once you’ve dialed in a sound on the analog voice, you capture it as a sample. Those samples then feed the sequencer’s six tracks. The analog section works as a sound-design bench, the digital side as your performance layout: no more fighting to share one mono voice between several drum hits in real time — you freeze what you built and trigger it freely.
Projects and their sample banks live on an SD card, so you can keep a deep library of kits and recall them instantly. A high-resolution screen paired with knobs mapped straight to parameters keeps the whole thing playable rather than buried in menus — something Vermona has rarely compromised on.
A thoroughly modern sequencer
The sequencer goes well beyond steps on or off. It offers parameter locks, polymeter and swing, and it lets you sequence the effects themselves: pitch, reverse playback and decay time can shift step by step. On top of that sit DSP effects — bit crusher, overdrive, amplitude modulation, reverse — ranging from subtle to fully destructive.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Type | Hybrid drum machine: analog voice + sampling |
| Voice | One shapeable analog percussion voice (DRM-1 heritage) |
| Synthesis | Dual-range oscillator, pitch envelope, sine→square wave, FM, resonant LP/BP/HP filter |
| Sequencer | 6 tracks, parameter locks, polymeter, swing, effect sequencing |
| Effects | Bit crusher, overdrive, amplitude modulation, reverse playback |
| Storage | SD card (projects, patterns and sample banks) |
| Indicative price | Around £1,299 / $1,439 at pre-order |
My take
I’ve always had a soft spot for instruments that impose a productive constraint rather than a feature checklist. The drumDING is a fine example: instead of cramming in eight fixed voices, it makes you design each sound before you replay it. That build stage was central to the great analog workshop machines, and it changes how you write a groove. It isn’t cheap — at this price you’re in high-end boutique territory — but the coherence of the concept, plus Vermona’s well-known build quality, make it one of the most interesting rhythm releases of the year for me.
For more, see our piece on the Behringer Mini Pops 7, a very different reading of the drum box, as well as the eurorack pair Xaoc Devices Skopje and Budapeszt and the hybrid Isla Electronics Caladan, which share that taste for shapeable synthesis.
