Read on for the year’s best drum machines!

Perkons is a uniquely playable drum machine that lurches between percussion, synths and droning while exploding under your fingertips. It’s a thrilling machine that will take you to new places in your live performances. It’s not for methodical programming, it’s for chaos, thundering beats and volcanic pulses.

It starts with 4 digital sound engines with 3 modes of play that are bled through analogue filters and pumped full of overdrive. Each voice has 8 knobs to control different aspects of the sound so you can be continuously tweaking them. Or route in the waveform morphing LFO to take control of any of the parameters.

The 4-track sequencer can run each voice with independent time divisions and multiplications. Each step can harbour ratchets and probabilities which shuffles and grooves get differently out of hand for each track.

Internal effects include a BBD delay emulation and compressor for keeping everything banging together. Each track can be sent to external effects for further processing and the Master output has its own loop.

This thing is nuts.

Street Price: $1700
Erica Synths website.

Make sure to check out our guide on the Best Drum Machine Apps!

The TR-8S brings Roland’s love of beats forward and into the future. It brings together their most slick interface, their most versatile sounds, and the ability to perform with rhythms in the best possible way. They call it a “Rhythm Performer” and it was designed to play live.

Inside you’ll find the largest and most authentic collection of TR sounds anywhere. Roland’s ACB technology models every aspect of those old sounds with every nuance, gasp, and sizzle. The TR-8S then takes things forward into the future with a huge library of custom samples, a wide range of FM sounds, and some very interesting effects.

You can bring in delays, reverbs, overdrive and drag it all through a filter tuned and specific to each sound and each kit. You can drop in fills and variations, making your beats flow and move as part of your performance. Making new patterns on the fly, swapping between 3 fills and 8 variations makes for an exciting and unexpected performance.

The interface is crying out for manipulation and you have individual outputs to mix and individual triggers if you want to take the power of the TR-8S into other gear or bring something else into the mix. It’s thoroughly modern and totally exciting.

Street Price: $399.99
roland.com

They call it an organismic drum machine and you’d better believe this thing is alive and with a mind of its own. You don’t so much program it as join it in an adventure into rhythm and groove. It’s surprising, different, mind-boggling, and experimental. Nothing about this machine is as you’d expect, and it will probably change your life.

It’s a semi-modular device which means that it’s wired together for you, but you can break all those connections and make it work differently by patching it together. The 4-channels of bass, percussion, snare, and cymbals seem simple enough until you realize you’re not making patterns but generating looping animals that clash and affect one another. You’re not shaping sound, you’re shaping events that combine, flow, repeat, and produce sound at some other point. It’s difficult to explain–can you tell?

There is MIDI and synchronization if you want it but with the Pulsar-32 sync is less important than expression and investigation. There are 23 modules, 55 knobs, 11 switches, and over 100 inputs and outputs for patching. It’s wonderfully mad, beautifully conceived, and more fun than a drum machine is ever supposed to be.

Street Price: $2,099
somasynths.com

The RD-8 is a tribute to the most influential drum machine ever built. Behringer has done the one thing people kept asking Roland to do–re-release a genuine 808 drum machine.

Roland attempted it with their TR-08 Boutique but it was small and fiddly and was actually a digital model of analog sound which sounded great but seemed to miss the mark. Behringer decided to do it right with a full-sized, fully analog drum machine recreating the original TR-808 sound and workflow while making a few tweaks of their own.

The RD-8 features all the same 12 tracks and 16 drums sounds as the original with the familiar layout, tuning, and level knobs. But Behringer has added a few features that bring it up to date. There’s a completely variable swing, flam per note and per voice, some randomization factors, and a dedicated tuning knob for the kick drum so you can use it as a bass line over MIDI. Of course, MIDI and USB-MIDI are implemented throughout.

The new Wave Designer section offers control over transients and the shaping of attack and sustain and a highpass/lowpass filter that each instrument can be sent to individually. On the back are individual outputs on 1/4″ jacks and 3 trigger outputs to control other modular gear.

The sequencing workflow has been improved and simplified in line with how step sequencing has evolved and now programming 808 beats is now easier than ever.

The new MKII version reworks some of the internal components to make the sound even more authentic than the MKI and improves the noise and phase at the outputs. Otherwise, the functionality is identical.

Behringer has produced exactly what everyone has been asking for while giving it a modern spin and a ridiculously low price of $349. The original was $1,195 and second-hand examples can go for much more than that. And if the 909 sound is more your style then the Behringer RD-9 has just arrived for the same price and very similar features.

Street Price: $349
behringer.com

Korg has been making these little Volca machines for a few years now and each one has been a little box of genius. They’ve made percussion-orientated ones before with the Volca Kick and the Volca Beats but the latest member of the Volca club takes it into a digital direction with some wild and distinctive sounds (because not everyone wants to sound like an 808).

Volca Drum has a 6-part DSP synth engine that can generate a wide range of unexpected sounds. Starting with a simple trigger waveform it can be folded, overdriven, overtoned and distorted in all sorts of ways before running through a waveguide resonator effect to bring the sound to life. Whatever happens, it won’t be quite what you expect.

Each of the 6 parts has 2 layers, for which you can choose 1 of 5 oscillator waveform types including sine, sawtooth, noise and 3 types of pitch modulator and envelopes. Layers can be edited together or separately, giving you fine control over the emerging sound. The Waveguide Resonator physically models either a tube or a string to give the sound a solid or sustained character.

Along with plenty of knobs to play with, there’s a 16-step sequencer with parameter recording per step in either step or real-time. Up to 16 sequences can be chained, giving you 256 steps. You can play rolls by slicing, replace active steps, add accents and set choke priority. And there are two randomization functions to mess it all about.

Volca Drum is a comprehensive little box of digital percussion adventures that sounds like nothing else out there and can run on batteries and sync up to any other Volca or modular gear for only $149.99.

Street Price: $149.99
korg.com

Elektron produce some of the most bad-ass groove boxes and drum machines on the planet. But they can be a bit deep and complex in places. With Model:Samples, Elektron has tried to simplify their workflow and build a machine that’s fun to use, easy to access but will still blow your socks off.

Model:Samples is a 6-track groove box packed full of high-quality digital samples. There are 300 preset sounds ranging from the all too familiar kits to sounds you’ve never heard before. There’s a full set of knobs and controls to let you tweak and transform any sound into something completely your own. You can play the sounds using the 6 velocity-sensitive pads or you can step-sequence one sound at a time.

Every step in the sequencer can have its own sound, its own parameters locked in for ever-changing grooves, basslines, and melodies. Because samples can be anything, this doesn’t have to be all about the beats. There’s a “Chance” parameter which introduces probability and randomness to the sequencer steps. It’s an immensely playable and fluid groove box.

You can save 96 projects with 96 patterns per project with up to 64 steps. There are a resonant multimode filter and one LFO on every track. There are 64MB of sample memory and 1GB of storage so you can fill it with your own content.

Elektron Model:Samples is instant, accessible, and full of awesome samples for only $299.

Street Price: $299
elektron.se

The Moog DFAM (Drummer From Another Mother) is an unusual beat making beast. It originally came out of workshops that Moog hosts at their MoogFest convention and has developed into a really interesting pattern-generating analog percussion synthesizer.

It’s built in the same form as their Mother-32 semi-modular synthesizer. It uses a white noise generator and two wide-ranging analog oscillators as the sound source with Hard Sync and voltage-controlled FM. It has a classic high and low pass Moog ladder filter for shaping the tone, either down for more impact and dimension or up for expressive strikes and fizz. Three envelopes work dynamically with the sequencer to keep some things sharp while other things evolve.

The sequencer is one of the simplest you’ll see, with just 8 steps and pitch and velocity per step. The 24-point patch bay gives you the open opportunity to push sound in different directions and invite manipulation from multiple sources.

The result is complex, organic, exciting and unexpected. At $649 it’s awesome by itself but comes alive when paired with other analog machines like the Mother-32.

Street Price: $649
moogmusic.com

The Drumlogue is a hybrid drum machine. It combines the rich power of analog with the edgy versatility of digital into a unique sounding machine of beats and explosions.

On the analog side you have perfectly crafted circuitry from legendary engineer Junichi Ikeuchi who worked on the ARP 2600M, MS-20 and ARP Odyssey. These circuits produce the kick, snare and tom tracks and are full of rich overtones and analog bite. You can feel the snare sizzling through a mix while the bass generates a thick sense of foundation.

Meanwhile, with the fundamentals taken care of, the Drumlogue gives you an opportunity to explore a whole other range of possibilities with a total of 7 digital tracks. 6 of them are sample-based so you can pull in your own samples vias USB or play with the included library. The 7th track is dedicated to the internal “logue” multi-engine which supports a range of modelled sound engines, from noise, to Variable Phase Modulation and whole custom synth voices.

For beat making you have a dynamic 64-step sequencer running eleven tracks of independent rhythms, patterns and songs. You’ve got running steps to play with alongside a decent display to keep you in the creative zone. Round it off with a couple of decent effects and you’ve got a very powerful drum machine.

Street Price: $599
Korg.com