SIMIAN

A ten-voice drum synthesiser for Schwung on the Ableton Move. No samples in it.

Ported from OneTrick SIMIAN 2 by Punk Labs LLC — the drum engine is entirely theirs. It is free as in rights, not as in beer: if you play this, buy a copy.

Every sound is built, not played back. One voice is an oscillator that morphs from a triangle to a struck cymbal, a noise source behind a resonant filter, and a click — crossfaded together and swept by a single envelope that drags pitch and filter down as it falls. A kick and a hi-hat are the same synth with different numbers, which is why a whole kit here is 190 values and no audio files.

That recipe — a tuned oscillator yanked downward by its own envelope, mixed against filtered noise — is the sound of early-80s electronic drums, the hexagonal-pad era that Simmons made the sound of a decade. It is why the toms are the fun part: wind Bend up on a low Pitch and you are somewhere in 1983 within one knob. Nothing here is modelled on a specific machine, and Punk Labs make no such claim; it is that architecture, built honestly, with modern range on every control. Pull Bend back to zero and the same voice is a perfectly straight modern kick.

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Playing it

Sixteen pads, ten drums. Hit a pad and the pages follow it, so the knobs are always editing the drum you just heard.

 48 TomH*   49 Crash   50 Crash*  51 TomM*
 44 TomH    45 TomL*   46 OpHat   47 TomM
 40 Clap    41 TomL    42 ClHat   43 ClHat*
 36 Kick    37 Rim     38 Snare   39 Snare*

Six pads are a second pad on a drum another pad already owns — marked * above, and marked on screen with a small link under the drum's name. There are ten drums and sixteen pads, so this is how the grid fills up.

A linked pad shares everything except Tune. Turn Snare's Decay and the pad beside it changes too, because there is one snare. What the two pads differ by is Tune, a semitone offset, and it is the second knob on the Tone page. That is what makes 39 a second snare rather than a copy of 38.

Chokes work like a real kit. The three hats (42, 43, 46) cut each other off, and so do the two cymbals. A pad never chokes itself — hitting the same drum twice just retriggers it.

Sequencing from elsewhere: these are not General MIDI notes. The layout follows Move's own drum racks, and the aliases were put next to their parents. An imported GM drum loop will play the wrong drums.

The screen

Five pages. Jog through them; the first is the kit browser.

Page	What's on it
Kit	the 35 factory kits
Tone	Voice · Tune · Pitch · Wave · Bend · Bend Dyn · Decay · Punch
Noise	Cutoff · Res · LP Bend · LP Dyn · Tone/Nse · Click
Mix	Volume · Pan · Vel Vol · Sat · Reverb · Send A · Send B
Master	Gain · Drive · Sat · Rev Size · Rev Gate · Vel Sens · Transpose

Tone, Noise and Mix are three views of one drum. The Voice knob picks which, and it moves all three pages together. It shows the drum's name, with the link mark under it when that drum has a second pad.

Tone — the oscillator

Tune	This pad's pitch offset, ±24 semitones. The only control a linked pad does not share.
Pitch	Oscillator frequency, 30 Hz – 4.4 kHz. Low for a kick, high for a rim.
Wave	Morphs the oscillator from a filtered triangle (0) to a sampled cymbal played at pitch (100). Not a switch — everything between is a real crossfade.
Bend	How far the envelope drags the pitch, ±36 semitones. A kick is a big downward bend; this is where most of the punch in a drum synth lives.
Bend Dyn	How much of that bend velocity controls. At 100 a soft hit barely bends and a hard one bends fully.
Decay	10 ms – 2 s. Velocity always shortens it, and that is built into the engine rather than a control: the lightest hit decays in 30% of the time you set, a full-velocity one in all of it.
Punch	Bends the shape of the envelope rather than its length: from an even fall to one that holds and then drops.

Noise — the other half of every drum

The noise source has its own resonant lowpass with its own envelope sweep. Snares, hats and claps are mostly this.

Cutoff	440 Hz – 15 kHz.
Res	Emphasis at the cutoff. Gentle by design — it tops out around Q 2, so it colours the noise rather than ringing into a tone of its own.
LP Bend	How far the envelope sweeps that cutoff, ±36 semitones.
LP Dyn	How much of the sweep velocity controls.
Tone/Nse	The crossfade between oscillator and noise. Near 0 is a kick or a tom, the middle is a snare, near 100 is a hat. The most defining knob in the module.
Click	Fades a short noise transient over the attack. It is the stick, and it is most of what makes a quiet drum audible in a busy mix.

Mix — per drum

Volume	−60 to +6 dB.
Pan
Vel Vol	How much velocity controls level. At 0 every hit is equally loud.
Sat	Saturation on this drum alone, before the master stage.
Reverb	Send into SIMIAN's own reverb — size and gate live on Master.
Send A / Send B	Sends into the host's return buses.

Master — the whole kit

Gain	Output level.
Drive	Into the limiter. Defaults to −6 dB; push it for glue and weight.
Sat	Saturation across the mix.
Rev Size	The internal reverb's decay.
Rev Gate	A gate across the reverb return, as a threshold. At the bottom (−100 dB) the reverb is never gated; raise it and the tail is cut off the moment the reverb falls below it — the gated-reverb snare.
Vel Sens	How much velocity does anything at all. At 0 the kit plays flat.
Transpose	±12 semitones across every drum.

Performance

• Mod wheel sweeps every drum's filter cutoff down by up to 32 semitones — a DJ filter across the whole kit.
• Pitch wheel scales every decay from 20% to 180%. A staccato control, not a bend, and deliberately not saved with the kit.

Kits

35 factory kits, all from OneTrick SIMIAN 2, on the Kit page. They are only parameter sets, so anything you hear you can reach and change. Kit 0, Basic, is the init kit.

Routing

Each of the ten drums can go to its own bus in the host, and each carries Send A / Send B into the return buses. Both pads of a linked pair follow their drum onto one bus — one voice, nothing to separate.

⚠ A drum routed to a bus leaves before the master stage. It keeps its own Volume, Pan and Saturation but not the global Drive, Saturation, limiter or Gain, because those act on a mix that no longer contains it. Expect it to get louder — about 4 dB at the default Drive. The reverb return and every unrouted drum still pass through Master. Shared glue over routed drums belongs in the bus, not on Master.

The Reverb send stays global whatever the routing: it is the send, not the drum.

Differences from OneTrick SIMIAN 2

The engine is upstream's, unmodified. These are what a OneTrick user would notice:

• The pad layout is Move's, not General MIDI's — see the note above.
• Global Transpose works. Upstream declares it and reads it nowhere, so in 2.0.2 it does nothing at all. Same for Sensitivity. Both act here.
• Volume bottoms out at −60 dB instead of −100, where the last 40 dB of knob travel are all equally inaudible.
• Every pad sounds. Upstream's pedal-hat and ride notes only choked and made no sound of their own; here they are a second hat and a second cymbal, and they still choke.
• A repeated note always sounds, including two hits inside one audio block, which upstream can drop.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. The DSP, the factory kits and original source/ are Copyright (c) 2024 Punk Labs LLC. The cymbal sample is by Kevin Hall, CC0 (see src/dsp/faust/samples/LICENSE.txt). The wrapper, widget and tooling are Copyright (c) 2026 Josh Gaines / legsmechanical, same licence. Full breakdown of what is and is not in the binary: NOTICES.md.

Building, testing and the porting notes: docs/DEVELOPING.md.