A drum machine with no drums. Four live radio stations, each wired through its own Buchla-style low-pass gate, plucked into rhythm by MIDI or its onboard 16-step sequencer. The airwaves are the sound source. The gate is the instrument.
TT-1 Radio Drum is a four-channel rhythm instrument that doesn't contain a single sample. Instead it tunes in four live internet radio stations — a music band, a wash of static, a voice/comms channel, a warbling drone — and slams each one through its own low-pass gate: the classic West-Coast circuit where one envelope opens both volume and a resonant filter at the same time. Hit it short and you get a percussive tick carved out of whatever's on air. Hold it and the station blooms into a ringing, pitched wash. No two bars are ever the same, because the source is the world's radio, not a static WAV.
It is the spiritual sibling of the DELTALAB clock machine: one idea, executed to the bone, with the controls you actually reach for and nothing you don't.
Drop it on a MIDI track and every note becomes a gate pluck. The four channels are mapped to four notes — play them from your keyboard, a drum rack, or any clip. Or arm the built-in 16-step sequencer and let it run, locked to Live's transport: tempo, swing and start/stop follow the set automatically. Velocity drives how far each gate opens, so a soft hit is a dark thud and a hard hit snaps bright. It behaves like a four-voice Buchla percussion box you conduct from the piano roll.
The four sources are live radio out of the box — but the gates don't care what they're chopping. Route a drum bus, a synth, a vocal or a whole mix into it and the same envelope-driven low-pass gates turn it into rhythmic, resonant stabs locked to your grid: gated reverbs, stutter ducks, pumping textures, that half-broken-shortwave bite on a pad. Radio in, or your audio in — the instrument is the gate, and it gates anything.
Like the DELTALAB clock machine, every parameter earns its place. Per channel: