IK MULTIMEDIA UNO Drum £255 STREET
At the risk of sounding like a grandparent staring wistfully at an urban development and bemoaning how ‘I remember when all of this was fields’, I remember when IK Multimedia just did software. Ah, those heady days, when companies were trying to get a computer to do every musicmaking task and we threw all of our hardware out to pasture. Nowadays, of course, there’s been an almost total reversal in hardware’s fortunes, helped in no small part by former software-only companies such as IK Multimedia, Arturia, NI and many more deciding to get back into the hardware-manufacturing game.
These companies have responded to – and indeed helped to create – the insatiable demand for inexpensive, great-quality hardware instruments that really do help us producers look like we’re actually making music, rather than writing emails – and that has to be a good thing.
IK made huge waves last year with its first hardware synth, called UNO Synth, that delivers a big sound from a small, lightweight body. The all-new UNO Drum on test here is very much its sister product in terms of both its design and scope and could quite easily make as big an impact in the world of beat-making as Synth did in, well, synthesising.
THE UNO DUO
UNO Drum very much takes on the look of its sister synth, albeit in a whiter shade. It’s the same size, weighs the same, even has the same four/three rotary combination on the front panel, with the first four dials controlling a matrix of options at the top left of the device. There are differences between the two siblings, of course, so the keyboard on UNO Synth now becomes 12 drum touch-sensitive pads, beneath which sits
