Portal Drum is an ultra-powerful sound designer for creating tuned-drum sounds. Portal Drum is particularly well suited to create kick drums but it will also create many great sounding toms, percussion instruments, and synth/bass lines. With Portal Drum, we wanted to make a new canonical drum sound with subtle nostalgia. Through this portal you will undoubtedly discover new territories!
Portal Drum utilises an underlying philosophy that we feel an instrument should sound right with minimal or even no additional processing. You will immediately find Portal Drum fits much better in a mix without compression, post-EQ, layering, resampling, etc. This keeps the music making process more immediate and fun.
Portal Drum features a total of 3 painstakingly designed envelopes to drive pitch sweep (FM), TRANSIENT, and AMP DECAY. These novel envelopes are a big part of Portal Drum’s characteristic sound and not found in any other drum synthesizer.
The Portal fold circuit adds focused and more interesting nonlinearities from subtle warmth and saturation to near-extraterrestrial reaches that cut a tunnel through the spectra.
The equalisation section of Portal Drum contains a HPF for keeping your tunes lite while the GAP FILTER drastically contours and pushes frequency content to the edges providing a huge array of drum tones.
The Portal Drum is the first instrument of ours to feature the DynaControl system. This gives the user a way to macroise a particular drum design and be able to play it easily and musically with minimal external patching. In fact, only one wire is needed to control the hit and up to 6 parameters which gives the user a realistic ‘how hard’ input as found on a real drum.
Portal Drum is capable of a ton of different drum sounds - everything from minimal ‘pillow kicks’ and toms to esoteric perc sounds, rimshots, woodblocks, claves, and ticks n clicks. Just listen and twiddle and you will find your own special spots.
Features
- PORTAL and SATURATION wave distortion modes (CVable)
- PITCH modulation with custom envelopes provide fully adjustable FM sweeps (CVable)
- Selectable pitch envelope shapes: ‘Rabid Elephant’ and ‘Classic’
- AMP DECAY for adjusting the duration of the kick (CVable)
- TRANSIENT generator for adding all sorts of colours of cliks, tiks, cluks, etc. (CVable)
- HPF gives other bass frequencies room and controls liteness
- Powerful EQ sculpting with the Gap Filter (CVable)
- MEOW displaces the bloom of harmonic energy instead of placing it all up front
- Three meticulously crafted custom envelopes for FM, AMP, and TRANSIENT
- DynaControl system for applying musical dynamics to any or all CVable parameters with just a single input - with one cable it is possible to expressively run the entire drum
- Six switchable analogue S&H circuits on all CV inputs
- Fully-featured 3 mode attenuverters on all CV inputs for biploar, unipolar positive, or unipolar negative knob operation.
- Dual concentric conductive plastic pots with long cycle life and smooth action to increase feature density with no compromises to ergonomics
- Low loss, high speed active reverse voltage protection, overcurrent protection, ESD protection
- 20HP
- 80mA +12V
- 80mA -12V
- 0mA 5V
How much is my shipping?
Shipping is automatically calculated before you submit your payment information. Simply add items to your cart and proceed to the checkout page, where you'll be offered shipping options and their prices. In the UK it's normally around £4 for order values under £150, and free above that. Shipping to mainland EU is typically between £7 and £20, depending on the shipping method and the size and weight of the order.
Do you ship to my country?
Almost certainly - the site will give you an estimate of shipping costs if you add an item to the cart and then enter your country and postcode. If you have specific requirements (such as if you prefer UPS over FedEx, for example) then let us know in advance and we'll try to work something out for you.
Shipping methods
We use a combination of Parcelforce, DPD, Royal Mail and UPS for the UK, and for international orders it's either Royal Mail, UPS, DHL or FedEx depending on where you are in the world. If you have a particular preference then try to let us know BEFORE you order so we can look into it for you. Please note that there may occasionally be additional shipping charges if you live in a remote area, depending on what surcharges are applied by the shipper. We'll get in touch to discuss this with you in such cases.
Dispatch times
For UK orders, we normally dispatch the same working day if we get the order before 15:00. If you have a really urgent situation then of course drop us an email before ordering and we'll always do our absolute best to accommodate you.
For international orders, we normally dispatch the same day if we get the order before 13:00 but again, occasionally it might be the next day before we can send it out, and sometimes FedEx or UPS may come a little earlier than scheduled which would also push an order into the next day.
Shipping times
Since April 2020 the couriers we use have suspended guarantees for shipping times, so even though we're paying them for priority services - 24-48 hours for most of the world - in practice it's often an extra day on top and sometimes it can be longer.
There is absolutely nothing we can do about this unfortunately. If you are outside the UK and it's a life-or-death situation where you absolutely MUST have that passive mult for the next day then... it may be better to find a local supplier.
Saturday shipping
If you're in the UK and you order before 15:30 on a Friday then we can send something for a Saturday delivery (NB: this applies to UK mainland addresses only). The success rate with DPD is about 95% so it's worth a punt most of the time. Please note that if you select Saturday shipping on an order placed earlier in the week, we'll wait until Friday to ship it.
Pre-orders
If a product is listed as a pre-order, it means we've ordered it from the supplier but it's not physically in stock yet. The product listing will include an estimated shipping date based on the best information we have from the supplier, but do bear in mind this is subject to change and is not a guaranteed date.
If you place an order containing a mixture of in-stock and pre-order items, we'll normally hold off on shipping anything until the pre-order item(s) have arrived, rather than splitting it into multiple shipments. If you need the in-stock items sooner, we'd recommend placing separate orders. As always, please get in touch if you have questions.
Product Overview
Portal Drum is an ultra-powerful sound designer for creating tuned-drum sounds. Portal Drum is particularly well suited to create kick drums but it will also create many great sounding toms, percussion instruments, and synth/bass lines. With Portal Drum, we wanted to make a new canonical drum sound with subtle nostalgia. Through this portal you will undoubtedly discover new territories!
Portal Drum utilises an underlying philosophy that we feel an instrument should sound right with minimal or even no additional processing. You will immediately find Portal Drum fits much better in a mix without compression, post-EQ, layering, resampling, etc. This keeps the music making process more immediate and fun.
Portal Drum features a total of 3 painstakingly designed envelopes to drive pitch sweep (FM), TRANSIENT, and AMP DECAY. These novel envelopes are a big part of Portal Drum’s characteristic sound and not found in any other drum synthesizer.
The Portal fold circuit adds focused and more interesting nonlinearities from subtle warmth and saturation to near-extraterrestrial reaches that cut a tunnel through the spectra.
The equalisation section of Portal Drum contains a HPF for keeping your tunes lite while the GAP FILTER drastically contours and pushes frequency content to the edges providing a huge array of drum tones.
The Portal Drum is the first instrument of ours to feature the DynaControl system. This gives the user a way to macroise a particular drum design and be able to play it easily and musically with minimal external patching. In fact, only one wire is needed to control the hit and up to 6 parameters which gives the user a realistic ‘how hard’ input as found on a real drum.
Portal Drum is capable of a ton of different drum sounds - everything from minimal ‘pillow kicks’ and toms to esoteric perc sounds, rimshots, woodblocks, claves, and ticks n clicks. Just listen and twiddle and you will find your own special spots.
Features
- PORTAL and SATURATION wave distortion modes (CVable)
- PITCH modulation with custom envelopes provide fully adjustable FM sweeps (CVable)
- Selectable pitch envelope shapes: ‘Rabid Elephant’ and ‘Classic’
- AMP DECAY for adjusting the duration of the kick (CVable)
- TRANSIENT generator for adding all sorts of colours of cliks, tiks, cluks, etc. (CVable)
- HPF gives other bass frequencies room and controls liteness
- Powerful EQ sculpting with the Gap Filter (CVable)
- MEOW displaces the bloom of harmonic energy instead of placing it all up front
- Three meticulously crafted custom envelopes for FM, AMP, and TRANSIENT
- DynaControl system for applying musical dynamics to any or all CVable parameters with just a single input - with one cable it is possible to expressively run the entire drum
- Six switchable analogue S&H circuits on all CV inputs
- Fully-featured 3 mode attenuverters on all CV inputs for biploar, unipolar positive, or unipolar negative knob operation.
- Dual concentric conductive plastic pots with long cycle life and smooth action to increase feature density with no compromises to ergonomics
- Low loss, high speed active reverse voltage protection, overcurrent protection, ESD protection
Technical Specs
Shipping Details
How much is my shipping?
Shipping is automatically calculated before you submit your payment information. Simply add items to your cart and proceed to the checkout page, where you'll be offered shipping options and their prices. In the UK it's normally around £4 for order values under £150, and free above that. Shipping to mainland EU is typically between £7 and £20, depending on the shipping method and the size and weight of the order.
Do you ship to my country?
Almost certainly - the site will give you an estimate of shipping costs if you add an item to the cart and then enter your country and postcode. If you have specific requirements (such as if you prefer UPS over FedEx, for example) then let us know in advance and we'll try to work something out for you.
Shipping methods
We use a combination of Parcelforce, DPD, Royal Mail and UPS for the UK, and for international orders it's either Royal Mail, UPS, DHL or FedEx depending on where you are in the world. If you have a particular preference then try to let us know BEFORE you order so we can look into it for you. Please note that there may occasionally be additional shipping charges if you live in a remote area, depending on what surcharges are applied by the shipper. We'll get in touch to discuss this with you in such cases.
Dispatch times
For UK orders, we normally dispatch the same working day if we get the order before 15:00. If you have a really urgent situation then of course drop us an email before ordering and we'll always do our absolute best to accommodate you.
For international orders, we normally dispatch the same day if we get the order before 13:00 but again, occasionally it might be the next day before we can send it out, and sometimes FedEx or UPS may come a little earlier than scheduled which would also push an order into the next day.
Shipping times
Since April 2020 the couriers we use have suspended guarantees for shipping times, so even though we're paying them for priority services - 24-48 hours for most of the world - in practice it's often an extra day on top and sometimes it can be longer.
There is absolutely nothing we can do about this unfortunately. If you are outside the UK and it's a life-or-death situation where you absolutely MUST have that passive mult for the next day then... it may be better to find a local supplier.
Saturday shipping
If you're in the UK and you order before 15:30 on a Friday then we can send something for a Saturday delivery (NB: this applies to UK mainland addresses only). The success rate with DPD is about 95% so it's worth a punt most of the time. Please note that if you select Saturday shipping on an order placed earlier in the week, we'll wait until Friday to ship it.
Pre-orders
If a product is listed as a pre-order, it means we've ordered it from the supplier but it's not physically in stock yet. The product listing will include an estimated shipping date based on the best information we have from the supplier, but do bear in mind this is subject to change and is not a guaranteed date.
If you place an order containing a mixture of in-stock and pre-order items, we'll normally hold off on shipping anything until the pre-order item(s) have arrived, rather than splitting it into multiple shipments. If you need the in-stock items sooner, we'd recommend placing separate orders. As always, please get in touch if you have questions.
