Korg Volca Drum

You will need to invest a bit of time to learn the interface and the button combos. Once you have all that underway you can actually perform with this little device.
I bought it as a very high class metronome basically. I thought I'll programs some beats and then play over them to practice. Now I see there is a live performance factor to this that you don't want to out it down and pick up a bass or anything. It will keep you entertained for hours sculpting sounds and rhythms.
Build is great. People are complaining about the small interface. And the micro adjustments being a problem but the micro increments are what gives it that insane sound when sweeping the pitch from low to high while also increasing the release of on the the parameters will give you other worldly sounds that if the knobs were clickable or had less micro increments you would miss out on.

I could talk for hours about this but for 130 euro or there or there abouts it's well worth buying and seeing for yourself!

Everyone have his/hers favourite volca, for me it is the Drum.

1. You can use it as a standard drum machine for a simple setup

or

2. You can fiddle with every sound (there are 6 parts), in many, many ways. If you know even a bit about analog synthesis - this will be a fun process. After you will arrive at the set of 6, you can than sequence them and save your preset. And than - you can chain patterns!

The waveguide effect is something interesting. Not very easy to use, it can be a bit unpredictable at the beggining, but - well - you can arrive at interesting delay/repeat/echo effects with it.

The volca drum offers a lot of possibilities and is one of the few from the series that has such depth in the synth engine. If you get yourself familiar with the machine and utilise its limitations effectively, it can do drum, synth and effect sounds pretty well. The sequencer is good and perhaps one of the better from the series. With a little practice, you can perform just fine with it.

What bothers me about the volca drum is programming sounds. There's a lot of menu diving involved and in some cases you'll have to dial in settings with one knob while looking at its tiny OLED screen. The buttons lack a pleasing "click" that makes fine-tuning specific values difficult.

If you don't mind taking time for programming drums and you're fine with working with a tiny (but perfectly legible) screen, the volca drum is a great little machine for what it offers. It's just not that accessible and immediate as other volcas in the range.

The Volca Drum is a lot of power in a little box, ridiculous sound-shaping capabilities so that it can certainly be used as a groovebox rather than simply a drum machine.

But getting the sounds you want takes time and patience, with one parameter knob doing a lot of the work.

If you've got time to spend, maybe on a long trip or while waiting for something, it's a great way to entertain yourself. And if you're new to synths, it's a good educational tool, learning how things work to create specific sounds.

But I take a star away for the fact that it's not usually 'instant fun' for me, it takes a little while before the 'chore' element passes. Maybe I'm too impatient!