Review: Battalion by Unfiltered Audio

I’ll start this review with a gentle warning:

If you’re searching for a simple, prefab, “set it and forget it” electronic drum machine plugin, the software discussed below may not be your proverbial cup of tea.

If you’re instead in the market for a phenomenally deep and detailed percussive sandbox; stuffed with options for micro-shaping synthesized and sampled hits, sequences and beats; and designed with live performance and creative variation in mind… well, that’s some tasty-sounding tea, I’d say.

It’s also an apt description of Battalion by Unfiltered Audio, an impressive multi-synthesis-plus-sampling drum sequencing dynamo with a tidal wave of tweakable toys to tinker with. Feel like drinking that tea through a fire hose? Yeah, me, too. Pinkies up.

Unfiltered Audio’s Battalion is a drum machine that marries the depth of software with the performative fun of hardware.

The Fourteen-Per-Cent Solution

Gentle warnings and tea hoses aside, Battalion is deep. Really, really deep – like Mariana Trench territory. There are surely exotic critters living somewhere in the depths of Battalion that have never seen the light of day and would require a pressurized bathysphere with tuning fork attachments to discover.

Case in point – if I count correctly, there are 148 separate items on Battalion’s main Voice page that can be selected, set, clicked, pulled down, slid, adjusted, cranked or toggled. Many of these pull double – or quadruple, or octuple – duty, assigning values to different slots or engines depending on context. And the Voice tab is but one of five, each brimming with its own menagerie of juicy parameters.

So I’ll endeavour only to whirl through the major aspects of what this drumstravaganza — maybe fourteen percent or so of Battalion’s arsenal. Just bear in mind that there’s more – much, much more – in the depths, and it’s worth strapping on the swimfins and scuba mask for a further plunge.

If you like tea, of course.

The Battalion Begins

As mentioned above, the entrée to Battalion is the Voice page, where each of the eight drum slots can be defined and shaped. Before we address those, let’s touch on the main controls circling the interface, visible no matter which page is active:

• Top – Play and Stop controls (syncable to host), Preset controls and Global Random icon.
• Right – Master Volume, Clipper, Maximize and three-band EQ level controls.
• Bottom – selection buttons for the five main Battalion pages.
• Left – selectors for each of eight drum slots with Mute and Solo for each.

On the Voice page proper are all of the controls to sculpt the sound(s) in each drum slot. Every slot has two potential sources – a built-in drum synth and a sampler. The synth has more than twenty included engines, from Kick to Clap to FM and Haywire and Pillow, with five control dials (Pitch and four engine-specific parameters) for shaping sound in the Synth component.

The Sampler module includes hundreds of categorized samples, as well as search or drag-and-drop capabilities to use any outside sample you like. Four sampling engines, including Cloner and Granular options, influence the sampled sound accordingly. Sample start and end points are configurable and again, five controls (Pitch plus four engine-specific params) allow for precise sonic sculpting.

A Blend slider mixes the Synth and Sampler outputs to taste and a “Tone” section adds several algorithms for distortion and filter types to apply, with relevant controls. All of these various parameters invite you to dial in the specific sound you want – but there’s no reason (or expectation) for any drum in Battalion to be static in any way.

Still on the Voice page, Battalion deploys its first tools for introducing variation – a theme repeated throughout the workflow. Here, you’ll find basic controls for two AHD envelopes – assigned to the Synth and Sampler outputs by default, but available to modulate nearly everything else in sight. Ditto for two configurable LFOs, two assignable macros and separate Random and Velocity modulation sources.

Rounding out the Voice / individual drum slot page are modulatable (naturally) controls for Delay and Reverb sends, Pan and Voice Gain sliders and a Variation control that introduces the desired level of randomness to “almost every parameter” for every hit.

Wave the Conductor’s Bat(tali)on

That graduates us, finally, to the Perform page, next in the set of tabs at bottom. Here, you’ll find many of the same controls as on the Voice page, but now affecting (up to) all drums at once. This allows for real-time variation of parameters affecting the Env(elope), Synth, Sampler, Modulation and Sequencer functions.

Effects can be toggled on or off or inverted for each of the eight drum slots. There’s also a control for tweaking the Depth of each effect on the sound and a gradient to restrict how higgledy-piggledy the Perform page Randomize function can go.

One function is particularly cool here. If you find you prefer the Perform-twiddled version of one or more drums to your original Voice page machinations, pressing the Commit button locks in the manipulations you’ve made to the affected drum slots. Return to the Voice page and you’ll find the knobs retwiddled to match your new favourite settings. That’s a nice touch.

Step Up to Bat(talion)

You’re well covered when it comes to sequencing beats, as well. Battalion’s Seq page contains a full-featured step sequencer with plenty of room to manoeuvre.

Similar to the Voice page layout, there’s a separate sequencer for each drum, selected using the numbered slots on the left. The available options are then numerous and varied. To program individual hits manually, select a Length (up to 64) and Speed for the pattern and start ticking Fill boxes in the top row of the sequencer.

In the mood for something more geometric? Set the Steps (up to 16) for a pattern, then increase Fill to add Euclidean-style beats by default or choose a Pattern from all available combinations of your chosen step and fill numbers. Rotate to taste, if you like. Invert the whole thing. Surf the tea tsunami.

Particularly adventurous souls can combine the manual and generated beats, use the Humanize function to add some randomness, and then use the “Modify” parameters – Shift, Swing, Shape and Density – to creatively mangle their sequence further. But that’s only half the battle-ion here.

For each sequencer – one per drum slot, remember – Battalion offers ten modifiers to shape the sounds within. Some of these are sequencer standards – Vel(ocity), Pitch and Prob(ability) sliders among them. Others, like per-beat adjustments to timing (Shift), Env(elope) or Sends, are less common, but mighty handy.

A sane person might behold this cornucopia of adjustables, with a two-hundred-and-one value gradient (from -100 to 100) for each individual setting, and be content to fill in a few at strategic beat positions. But there are other, wilder possibilities. Each of the ten sequencer parameters has its own trigger mode and pattern length. So effects can be applied in broad strokes, staccato bursts or in offbeat blobs, entirely independent of the drum pattern they’re acting on.

Out Like a (Batta)lion

There are two full pages of Battalion left, but we’re finally beyond the stickiest bits. Take a breath.

The All tab is also sequencer-focused, with a compact view of the basic patterns and parameters for all drums on a single page. Pattern Steps, Fill, Pattern and other controls can be tweaked, individual hits added or removed and the Humanize factor adjusted.

Finally, the Mix/FX tab includes Gain controls and send effect levels for individual drum slots, Trigger and Choke group associations, Routing for each slot and find controls for Unfiltered Audio’s “Shatter Delay” and “Headspace Reverb” algorithms / send targets.

Drumming Up a Conclusion

That’s a glimpse of some of Battalion’s highlights – but just knowing all those knobs and dials and sliders exist doesn’t really do it justice. The level of fine control over every aspect of every beat produced by Battalion is impressive. The included sampler sounds, the curated “Voice Presets” and the main factory presets all sound fantastic, with some showcasing significant departures from what you might think a “mere drum machine” would sound like.

That versatility is one of Battalion’s biggest strengths. Within the hazy confines of rhythmic sound generation, this plugin can assume the form of nearly anything you’d need it to be. The onboard sounds and synth cover a wide range of digital sonic territory. The included sampler sounds – or alternatively, your own — and controls enable explorations of any stripe, from analog drum kits to glitch boxes to melodic riffs, shifting pulses and anything in between.

Battalion may not be the right tool for every situation and the “tea hose” feature set does introduce a few niggles. With all the various parameters and settings, it’s occasionally tricky to find and select – or to drag, or to reset – just the twiddly knob you’re looking for, and just the right amount.

The plugin is resizable, though, so if you need the extra pixels for finer control, they’re available. And the thorough manual helps with a few less-obvious user experience tips (drag sample start before end to play in reverse, for example, or Alt-click to recenter sequencer values). Speaking of user experience, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Battalion’s tremendously helpful tooltips, item-specific randomization locks and adjustable colour-coordinated skins (which eagle-eyed readers may have spied above).

For cheap and cheerful drum machine beats or bog standard four-on-the-floor percussive applications, the complexity in Battalion would be a considerable bit of overkill.

Unless you happened to want multiple controlled-random variations of the beat for different sections. Or modulatable layers and humanized variation. Or control over any aspect of the sound at a per-hit, per-drum, per-beat or other interval, potentially in a performance setting. Or, or, or. You get the general idea.

For truly simple applications, Battalion may be overly complex. But the sheer immensity and range – that’s depth and breadth, scubanauts – make Battalion an exciting and attractive choice for a do-it-all Pandora’s box of patterned percussion possibilities.

I’ll bet the thing even makes a decent cup of tea.

Find out more about Unfiltered Audio’s Batallion