Attack Magazine

Dance Music, Production and Culture

Attack Magazine is a general podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 10 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Attack Magazine, a general show with 10 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Attack Magazine

  Mike Taylor: “Too much Analysis Causes Paralysis”

  Sep 21, 2026—

  Mike Taylor's vocals and creative ideas have shaped some of dance music's biggest records. With "LOVE.", he puts his own artistry back at the centre. We sat him down for our regular round of questions, some about the music, some not. Mike Taylor made his name behind other artists' biggest moments, most notably his Gold-certified feature on Unlike Pluto's "Everything Black". With "LOVE.", his first solo single since, he steps forward on his own terms. We caught up with him to talk house music's lineage, Philadelphia roots and what happens off the decks. What's your greatest fear? Running out of time. Not the money version of that, the living version. I don't want to get to the end and realise I took the small things for granted. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Overthinking. Too much analysis causes paralysis. I can talk myself out of something good by inventing a problem that was never there. If you weren't making or playing music, what would you be doing? Special effects. I fell in love with Rick Baker's work on the "Thriller" video as a kid and wanted to do prosthetics for film. If not that, anthropology. Why people do what they do has always fascinated me. What was your most embarrassing moment? An audition for a play in Philly. I can perform for thousands of people no problem, but put me in a small room and ask me to speak, and I lock up. I got so flustered I literally could not see the words on the page. What would your superpower be? Storm. Control of the elements. People think weather, but think about minerals, the ocean, everything buried in the earth we can't reach. You could feed people with that. If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose? The ozone layer. Put the planet back the way we found it. We talk about extinction like it's dinosaurs and things we never met, but we're losing things right now that we watched disappear in real time. Clean air, ice, coral, whole species. If I get one wish, I'm not spending it on a mammoth. I'm spending it on the Earth being healthy again. [quote align=right text="I'd rather be slow and be myself"] What was the last lie that you told? Some small excuse about why I was late to something. Nothing heavier than that. I'm annoyingly honest to my own detriment most of the time. Must visit record store or studio? Tower Records . I want the ritual back, standing at the listening station discovering something with no algorithm involved. Studio would be Electric Lady or Motown. How do you like to finish your sets? A palate cleanser. A left turn that catches you off guard but still connects, usually something tied to what's happening in the world or in culture that week. Never random for the sake of random. If not yourself, who would you most like to be? Little Richard, to see the world through his eyes. He's one of the most significant figures in pop music ever and people still underrate it. No Little Richard, no James Brown, no Prince, no Beatles. Living, I'd say Neil deGrasse Tyson or Angela Davis. I want to know what it feels like inside a mind like that. When's the last time you changed your mind about something significant? About a week ago. I was travelling through Europe and had to pivot on a bunch of decisions. It happens constantly. I've pulled entire songs on a gut feeling. What sparks your creativity? Everything, and I know how that sounds. But I've never been able to sit in one lane. I sew, I make my own patterns from scratch, and it's become the thing that keeps me calm more than anything else. I shoot photos. I cook. I love mixology, building a cocktail from nothing. I came up around film, and I co-directed this video with my best friend. When your toolbag is that big, everything becomes fuel, because I don't need to write a song to get the feeling out. I can take a picture or make a jacket or cook dinner and it's the same muscle, different part of the body. Who's the next name everyone should know? Kaleena Zanders . She's in my new video, and she's a powerhouse. Parson James too. A lot of people know him from the Kygo record, but he's a serious artist in his own right. Favourite sportsperson ever? Allen Iverson. Jordan is the GOAT, that's just fact. But I'm from Philly. What AI meant to that city and to the culture, you had to be there. What's been your best moment in a club or studio? I made a song called " Colors " and set an intention in the room for exactly how I wanted it to live in the world. Years later it got placed in a show and they used it precisely that way. As a writer you can say you want people to feel something, but that doesn't mean they will. That was confirmation. In a club it's the night the crowd decides to come with you and you can stop playing the safe records. Who taught or helped you the most? I'm a product of community and tribe. Every step of this has been someone handing me their wisdom, so I won't name names because I'd leave out fifty. I was the kid in the studio asking what does this knob do, and I still am. Worst job you've ever had? I danced for a high-end event company. Weddings, sweet sixteens, bar and bat mitzvahs. All the b boys and b girls I came up with did it for money, and honestly a lot of those nights were fun. But at times you got treated like the help in a way that felt dehumanising. It wasn't every gig. It wasn't most of them. But the nights you felt it, you really felt it. [quote align=right text="My heart is in soul music and always will be"] Which track do you wish you'd made? "Freetime" by Kenna . One of my favorite songs ever made. Funny enough there's a whole chapter about Kenna in Gladwell's Blink , about how nobody could categorize him and the industry froze. I relate to that more than I'd like to. What's the worst track or set you've ever done? I didn't play badly, but I've never been more stressed behind the decks. My roommate had swapped his laptop charger for mine without telling me. Smaller machine, different wattage. I took it to a gig and it trickled just enough to keep me alive without actually charging. Five hour set. My laptop sat at two or three percent for the last stretch of the night and never dropped, but I spent hours convinced the whole thing was about to go black mid-song. The crowd had no idea. I aged a year. How do you organize your music collection for your sets? Obsessively. I'm a true open format DJ, I play everything, and that only works if the library is built for it. I'm in Serato and I'm deep in smart crates, genres, subgenres, categories inside categories. It's an insane system. The reason is simple. Unless I'm doing a festival where it's more of an artist set, I'd say 98% of the time I'm reading the crowd in real time. You can't do that if you're hunting. The organization is what buys me the freedom to be spontaneous and actually enjoy myself while I do it. Recommend a film. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child , directed by Tamra Davis. She was his friend, so the interview footage in it is unlike anything else that exists on him. It's incredible. Recommend a book. Between the World and Me  by Ta-Nehisi Coates, or  The New Jim Crow  by Michelle Alexander. Not light, but both worth your time. Favourite internet clip of all time, music or otherwise? Two, and I can quote both. One is Little Richard in a Jimi Hendrix documentary, sitting at a piano insisting Hendrix was already a star when he got him, then pivoting to Sly, everybody is a star, some people just haven't been pulled up yet. The other is a James Brown interview on CNN from 1988 where he is in another dimension entirely, and somewhere in the middle of answering a question he just goes "I feel good, JAM." Not as a bit. As the answer. Jordan Peele did a remake of it years later and I started cackling, because I genuinely thought I was the only person on earth who found that clip as funny as I do. Turns out I was on Peele's wavelength the whole time. Who or what deserves more credit? Black American contribution to culture, full stop, because it comes wrapped in erasure. Stay just in music: Black artists have been foundational to essentially every popular genre. House and techno were created by Black, brown and queer people in Chicago, Detroit and New York, and somehow we're not the face of it. That's the pattern. We create it, then we don't get to participate in the success of it. We're never at the top of the food chain in the thing we built. And it's so effective that I've had my own people tell me I make white people music. Same erasure happened with rock and roll. Same with punk. It's ridiculous, and it keeps working. What gets too much hype? The exact inverse of my last answer. I'll be respectful and leave it there. You can do the math. What can't you stop doing? Doing things that fill me up. I say it that way because there's a version of this career that's already laid out for you, and it would make my life easier. I'm not interested in pandering to get there. It's probably cost me time and visibility, because I don't play the political game the way you're supposed to in order to move up fast. I'd rather be slow and be myself. What's your guilty pleasure? I don't feel guilty about anything I take pleasure in, so I'll give you the fun fact instead. I sew. I make clothes and draft my own patterns. I don't want to be a designer and I don't have a line. I do it because it calms me all the way down, and then I wear them. What's your biggest frustration in the music world? The industry acts like there can only be one. If you're a Black artist or a queer artist or sitting at any intersection, you get measured against whoever the system thinks is closest to you. I say that tongue in cheek, because usually we sound nothing alike. But people latch onto the one or two things that make us similar, which are always surface level and basic, and refuse to see everything that makes us different. I want us to get to be as nuanced as everybody else. House in particular is full of Women, Black artists and Queer artists who don't get shine, and when they finally do they get lumped into a category instead of being treated as individual artists with individual sounds. We don't do that to everyone. I'd just like the same room to be specific. Favourite label and why? Philadelphia International Records, hands down. Not just because I'm from Philly, but because of the sound they cultivated. Motown second. My heart is in soul music and always will be, and those two labels are where that lives. What's the hardest thing about making or playing music? Being told to pick a lane. I make what fills my cup at the pace I'm inspired, and my whole career I've been encouraged not to work that way. Pick one thing, do that thing, that's how you win. It's worse now because everything is algorithm driven. The algorithm rewards the audience you built in one genre, so the pressure to stay put is baked into the machinery. Even now, releasing electronic music under my name, I know there's a version of this where I make something else in two years and get told I can't. The music part I love. The industry part is harder to navigate. But the game is the game, and I'm ready to rock. Find Mike Taylor: Instagram , TikTok ,  Spotify , and Apple . [social-links heading="Follow Attack Magazine" facebook="https://www.facebook.com/attackmag" twitter="https://twitter.com/attackmag1" instagram="https://www.instagram.com/attackmag/" youtube="https://www.youtube.com/user/attackmag" soundcloud="https://soundcloud.com/attackmag" tiktok="https://www.tiktok.com/@attackmagazine"] [product-collection]

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Attack Magazine

  Making LCD Soundsystem-Style Drones

  Sep 21, 2026—

  Build a sound inpired by the pumping harmonic drone from LCD Soundsystem's Someone Great with u-he's Diva, then put it to work across several genres. If you’ve followed some of the recent Synth Secrets you’ll know that we love versatile patches. In other words, sounds that – with just minimal tweaks to the envelope or notes – can be used for a range of different genres or parts in an arrangement. Another great example of this can be found in LCD Soundsystem’s classic, Someone Great. Right from the start it features a rich, pumping, harmonic drone. That sound alone would be worth dissecting, but once you do, you quickly discover a load of other uses for it in your tracks. And it’s all the cooler for the fact that the sound itself is just a single sawtooth wave playing the right notes with a bit of modulation. Plus, critically, EQing / filtering . It sounds like this… Want to follow along? Grab the Diva trial here . Step 1 The simpler the patch, the more important it is to pick the right sound source, and for this we want rich, analogue vibes. So let’s start, as we so often do, by loading Diva and selecting a blank ‘init’ patch. Now load a Dual VCO and Analogue Env for envelopes 1 and 2. And set the BPM to 112. It’s a bit more of a sedate pace than the original but that lets us focus more clearly on the effect of the modulations. Step 2 Now we need the right notes and it turns out there’s a fifth or fourth note interval thing happening here: a dyad (two note chord) using G and D. Why fourth or fifth? Because we’ve actually got three D notes (D2, D3, D4) playing with the G3 sitting squarely between two of them, so it depends which D we consider the root note! As for length, set them just shy of a quarter note. Step 3 Getting back to Diva, disable Oscillator 1, leave oscillator 2 on the default sawtooth wave, tune oscillator two up an octave (that’s the number 4 setting on the knob) and rotate the VCO 1 / VCO 2 blend fully clockwise to VCO 2 only. Raise the Cutoff up to 108 and dial the Emphasis to 15.5. Listening to it now, we’re actually pretty close already. Step 4 We want some control of the note velocities to shape the tone of the patch. First set the velocity of the D2 note to full and the remaining three to 103. Next map velocity to control the volume of the notes in the VCA section by selecting Velocity as a modulator from the dropdown and then dialling up the modulation amount to maximum. Now our sound is a bit richer and has more bite.  Step 5 There’s one critical tonal element missing: EQ filtering. To better match the target patch cut a notch around four bands: 150Hz, 300Hz, 600Hz, and 1.2kHz. Notice two things about those frequencies: 1. Each is double the previous, therefore one octave up from the last. 2. They’re all hovering just around the frequency of the note D. So by cutting the root frequencies of those D notes, we’re emphasising that G.  Step 6 Let’s add pumping with envelopes and modulation… and we need a kick to judge the timing. Load a big, 909-style kick drum into a new channel now and let it play. On Env 1 set Attack to around 49 which instantly adds pump. Listening carefully to how they change the groove, set Decay 75, then set a slightly longer release tail of 29. And raise the VCA volume to full to bring the volume back up. Step 7 Now you can complement the amp envelope pumping with a little filter envelope action too. First dial the Env 2 filter modulation to fully +. Then go to Env 2 and, listening closely as you adjust, set the following: Attack 68 and Decay 49, and Sustain 0. Notice how we’ve both emphasised the pump and added more bite and tonal interest to the sound? Step 7 result: Step 7 result with LCD beat.mp3 : Step 8 To really match LCD’s original track we need a little bit of processing. Add Diva’s Plate 1 reverb with the Size set to maximum and the pre-delay dialled up halfway. The long pre-delay is because sound takes time to cover distance in real spaces, so if you make a sound in a large room there’s an audible gap before the sound is reflected off the boundaries and returns to your ears as reverb.  Step 9 We can add some sidechain compression pumping too, using the kick channel as the trigger. This plays nicely with the envelope-controlled pumping we already have. And last but not least, add tape drive saturation for vibes. Add this after the sidechain pumping because tape saturation harmonics increase with stronger signals, so the sidechain pumping creates more harmonics on the louder part of the pump! Step 10 We said from the start this is a versatile sound and we meant it. Both of these below examples are the exact same drone patch, just with a more percussive envelope shape. Big Belgian Snog Trumpet.h2p : Big Trumpet.h2p: Get a free trial of u-he Diva here . [social-links heading="Follow Attack Magazine" facebook="https://www.facebook.com/attackmag" twitter="https://twitter.com/attackmag1" instagram="https://www.instagram.com/attackmag/" youtube="https://www.youtube.com/user/attackmag" soundcloud="https://soundcloud.com/attackmag" tiktok="https://www.tiktok.com/@attackmagazine"] [product-collection]

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Attack Magazine

  Martha Bolton: “Real Change Happens When Everyone Moves In The Same Direction”

  Sep 17, 2026—

  NOT BAD FOR A GIRL founder Martha Bolton on why balanced lineups start years before the poster, and why "fewer women DJs" doesn't hold up. Debates about representation in electronic music tend to get heated fast. Comment threads and panel soundbites distort arguments that deserve more space, whether that's about lineup balance, studio access, mentorship or safety. With that in mind, Attack is starting a four-part series that gives people working on these issues the room to discuss the situation in greater depth. At the heart of the series is a simple question: can we close the gender gap? The questions remain the same for each interviewee. No one is asking for consensus; that’s impossible. But by opening up the floor, we can help build a broader understanding from other people’s perspectives and experiences. First up is Martha Bolton, founder of NOT BAD FOR A GIRL, the London-based collective and booking agency built exclusively around women and gender-diverse artists. Attack: If there are simply fewer women and gender-diverse DJs in the talent pool, is it fair to expect more balanced lineups? MB: It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. If there are fewer women and gender-diverse artists in the talent pool, we have to ask why that is. Is it because the talent doesn’t exist? Or is it because the pathway into the industry hasn’t been equally accessible? Some people like to argue the former, but the research clearly shows it’s the latter. At NOT BAD FOR A GIRL we’ve worked with hundreds of incredibly talented artists. The challenge isn’t that they don’t exist. It’s that they often haven’t had the same access to opportunities that help build a career, whether that’s studio space, mentorship, early bookings or industry networks. It’s not just barriers to entry - it’s also the experience people have while they are in the industry. I often say it doesn’t matter how many women you get into a studio if a significant proportion are going to experience sexual harassment or discrimination once they arrive. We know those experiences are far more common than they should be. If people don’t feel safe or respected, it’s no surprise that so many decide this industry isn’t for them. By the time you’re looking at a festival lineup, all of those experiences have already decided who made it through. So I don’t think lineups exist in isolation. They’re usually a reflection of everything that’s come before them, and just one part of a huge, wide issue. [quote align=right text="If you spend years looking at line-ups and never seeing anyone who looks like you, or constantly feeling like you have to prove you belong, eventually some people decide the industry just isn’t for them"] Some promoters would argue that their job is to sell tickets, not to fix structural inequality. What would you say to that? Ok but this argument misses the point. When did we start positioning diverse lineups in opposition to ticket sales? I think one of the biggest myths in dance music is that women and gender-diverse artists don’t sell tickets. We’ve built an entire business around exclusively booking women and gender-diverse talent. We've performed and run events all over the world, and we’re working with the biggest brands in dance music. So from my experience, that just isn’t true. I actually think promoters are leaving money on the table. If people don’t see themselves represented behind the decks, they’re less likely to buy a ticket. I’m told this time and time again by our audience. If your line-up only speaks to one demographic, don’t be surprised when your audience does too. Can you share a story that shows how inclusion – or the lack of it – has affected someone’s confidence, career path or creative output? One of my favourite parts of running NOT BAD FOR A GIRL is watching confidence grow. Our open decks are the best things we do, and the energy is always so gorgeous and supportive. We’ve had artists play their first proper club set with us, and a few months later they’re getting festival bookings, signing music or joining agencies. They didn't suddenly become great DJs overnight; they just finally found a platform that would believe in and support them. But I see the opposite happening too. If you spend years looking at line-ups and never seeing anyone who looks like you, or constantly feeling like you have to prove you belong, eventually some people decide the industry just isn’t for them. That’s a huge loss of talent before we’ve even had the chance to hear what they could add to the scene. [quote align=right text="accountability is less about throwing out one statement, and more about what happens over time"] What is the creative cost of a narrow industry? I think dance music suffers when the same voices are given the same opportunities over and over again. This type of music was built on people doing something different, and creating counterculture - that’s a huge part of what draws so many of us in. So if we’re only investing in the same types of artists, we’re limiting what the next generation of dance music sounds like. I see a lot of discourse at the moment about how all music is starting to sound the same, and I think this plays a huge part in that. It’s also worth remembering that great music doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s influenced by the opportunities people have, the people they meet and the environments they are able to create in. If certain groups face more barriers getting into studios, releasing music or building careers, then we’re losing ideas, influences and perspectives that could have defined the future of the scene. What does accountability look like beyond saying the right thing publicly? I think accountability is less about throwing out one statement, and more about what happens over time. For example, are you looking at your booking data? Are you reviewing who’s applying to your opportunities, who’s getting booked and who you are actually progressing? Are you able to listen and act when people tell you something isn’t working? I don’t think anyone expects perfection overnight. But I do think people notice when organisations are actually trying to improve versus when they’re just knee-jerk responding to criticism. It’s about long-term work away from the public eye, and it’s also about engaging with experts like us to help you make real and lasting change. Where do you think responsibility currently falls through the cracks, and who needs to step up? It’s true that responsibility gets passed around a lot, and it’s well known that when nobody is accountable, the work doesn’t get done. Promoters say they can only book who’s available, agencies say they’re responding to demand, labels say they’re signing what’s commercially viable; everyone shirks the responsibility and progress just doesn’t get made. The reality is everyone has influence over what the industry looks like, and it’s a shared responsibility to create a better future. This is exactly why organisations like NOT BAD FOR A GIRL are so important. We keep the conversation moving, and we’re uniquely positioned to bridge gaps between huge companies at the very top, artists, fans, and everyone in between. Real change happens when everyone moves in the same direction, and I think organisations like ours have a really important role in making that happen. Are lineups simply a billboard for deeper issues? If so, where should the real work begin? I actually think line-ups are the least interesting part of the conversation. They’re just the bit everyone can see. The real work is everything that happens before that; education, community, safety, networking, first opportunities and artist development. If we’re only talking about who’s on the poster every summer, we’re already too late. We should be asking what support artists received five years earlier that enabled them to be on that poster in the first place. That’s why so much of our work happens long before festival season. We run networking events, workshops, open decks, a record label and community initiatives because those are the things that build careers. If we get that part right, more representative line-ups become a byproduct, rather than the objective itself. And we can all stop talking about this and get back to listening to good music! Follow NOT BAD FOR A GIRL on Instagram . Submit to be an artist on their database here . [social-links heading="Follow Attack Magazine" facebook="https://www.facebook.com/attackmag" twitter="https://twitter.com/attackmag1" instagram="https://www.instagram.com/attackmag/" youtube="https://www.youtube.com/user/attackmag" soundcloud="https://soundcloud.com/attackmag" tiktok="https://www.tiktok.com/@attackmagazine"] [product-collection]

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Attack Magazine

  CRSSD After Dark Returns To San Diego Next Weekend

  Sep 16, 2026—

  CRSSD Festival's afterparty series returns to San Diego from 25 to 27 September with sets across multiple venues. CRSSD Festival has confirmed the return of CRSSD After Dark, its official afterparty series, for three nights in San Diego between 25 and 27 September 2026. The series extends the festival weekend beyond Waterfront Park, moving performances into venues across the city. This year's programming includes sets from VTSS, Ben UFO, Boys Noize, Helena Hauff, Groove Armada, Layton Giordani, salute, KAS:ST, Mathame and others, spread across ten venues: Palms Beach Club, SPIN, Quartyard, Rich's, EQ, The Brass Rail, Music Box, 3OZ Dive Club, Kiku Room and Vin de Syrah. Lineup and schedule across three nights According to the announcement, the schedule runs as follows: Friday 25 September Palms Beach Club: Close Friends Only, EREZ SPIN: VTSS Saturday 26 September Quartyard: Marco Strous aka Vinnie SPIN: Layton Giordani, Oscar L, Son of Son Rich's: Rossi., Jamback, Locklead EQ: Ben UFO, Notion The Brass Rail: AYYBO, Rafael aka Vinnie Music Box: salute, Faster Horses 3OZ Dive Club: Dean Turnley, Torren Foot Kiku Room: Ben UFO, Soul of Hex, John Manhard (sold out) Sunday 27 September SPIN (Freakquencies): Boys Noize, The Dare, Helena Hauff, SEES00000 EQ: Groove Armada (DJ set) The Brass Rail: GENESI, KAS:ST Music Box: Mathame, Fahlberg 3OZ Dive Club: Sam Alfred Vin de Syrah: GREG 99, Jay de Lys Get tickets from the CRSSD Festival website here. [social-links heading="Follow Attack Magazine" facebook="https://www.facebook.com/attackmag" twitter="https://twitter.com/attackmag1" instagram="https://www.instagram.com/attackmag/" youtube="https://www.youtube.com/user/attackmag" soundcloud="https://soundcloud.com/attackmag" tiktok="https://www.tiktok.com/@attackmagazine"] [product-collection]

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Attack Magazine

  Erica Synths Bullfrog Drums: More Than a Drum Machine

  Sep 14, 2026—

  A hands-on sampler and sequencer built with Richie Hawtin, the Bullfrog Drums wears "educational" lightly and delivers serious performance power. I've spent thirty-odd years now making noise with devices for a living, mostly in rooms with too many cables and not enough natural light. This one has Richie Hawtin's name attached to it, and Richie Hawtin's name is attached to a lot of things; he doesn't need "electronic music pioneer” tacked in front of it any more than I need "Italian" tacked in front of mine. What's interesting isn't the pedigree. It’s that Erica Synths built something genuinely useful with him, at a moment when most "collabs" exist to sell a story rather than an instrument. The Bullfrog Drums is sold as educational. I find this word does a lot of quiet work in marketing; it reassures the buyer that they're not overreaching, that failure is built into the premise. But somewhere around the third evening with this thing, loading in a field recording and hearing it disintegrate into something closer to Xenakis than to techno, I stopped thinking of it as a teaching tool. It's a machine for making decisions quickly, which is a rarer thing than it sounds, and possibly the only kind of freedom left that doesn't come with a subscription fee. Erica Synths has never pretended to be selling comfort. Their instruments have a certain Nordic bluntness to them; they assume you can handle a knob doing more than one thing, and they create “musical” tools that you can really “play”.  The Bullfrog Drums continues that habit as part of the wider Bullfrog series: machines built to make synthesis legible without making it smaller. It's part of the same-name line of instruments, and its capabilities, labelled "educational" by the company, extend far beyond the classroom. Flexible sample playback, hands-on control at every step, sequencing deep enough to lose an evening in, and enough external control to reach out and touch the rest of the studio.  Somewhere between the first and second night, it stops being a drum machine and becomes a highly capable creative tool for making and performing electronic music, full stop. Anatomy Of A Bullfrog Strip away the pedagogy and what's left is a sample-based drum machine and performance instrument built around dedicated, hands-on control rather than menu-diving, the kind of thing you can operate with the lights off, which after enough years in this business becomes a genuine criterion.  Seven voices, each playing mono samples, arranged across seven tracks, with an eighth given over entirely to CV and gate, a small door left open to the rest of the modular world. The onboard factory samples cover quite everything you may need to start grooving and experimenting. Each voice gives you level, a two-way filter (highpass and lowpass), resonance, pitch, drive, decay, loop length and pan- everything you need to turn a sound into a different sound, which is, when I think about it, most of what this job actually is. [quote align=right text="It produces the kind of unusual, slightly broken textures that make simple samples feel like they're improvising on their own"] Hands-On: From Power-Up To First Pattern Unbox the machine, and you’re ready to go. Erica programmed some patterns ready to go. You can quickly start to grasp the basics. Working with the Bullfrog Drums quickly reveals an instrument broader than its name suggests. Loading single- cycle waveforms through USB opened up a completely different approach, turning the machine into a compact synthesis and sequencing environment, closer, at moments, to a modular rack pretending to be a drum machine than the other way around. A sample here is never obliged to stay a sample. It can become the raw material for a texture, a rhythm, a melodic fragment that has nothing to do with where it started. Vocals, field recordings, synthesiser fragments, single-cycle waveforms, all fair game. There's even a built-in microphone, for the kind of lo-fi capture that used to require a cassette recorder and a certain contempt for fidelity.  You don’t get a huge toolkit, but what’s there is the best part. It’s like going back to the basics with a fantastic sequencer and real-time automation thrown on top. The hands-on workflow is the real argument for owning this thing. A dedicated control per voice means reshaping a sound while a pattern runs underneath it, with no menu between the idea and the result, and the integrated level mixer lets you balance everything from the instrument itself without reaching for a laptop mid-session, which I've come to regard as a small mercy. The sampling is unfussy: audio in via line input or the microphone, playback forwards or reversed, looped and reshaped through the same dedicated parameters. The sequencing is where the machine earns its keep: accents, ratchets, rolls, probabilities, microtiming, parameter locks, automation, all of it aimed at turning a one-bar idea into something that could hold a room for twenty minutes. Parameter locks and trig conditions let individual steps behave differently the second, third, seventh time around, so a simple pattern can grow into something genuinely alive, on stage as much as in the studio. Every step can carry its own automation, recorded in real time or programmed after the fact. A groovy mixture of factory samples and sampled noise machines. Filters and rolls are in real time. The latest firmware adds a pseudo time-stretch, slicing a sample across the sixteen pad triggers to fake the effect without the usual processing. It produces the kind of unusual, slightly broken textures that make simple samples feel like they're improvising on their own, a fitting bit of mischief from a company that seems constitutionally unable to leave a sample as a finished sound. That eighth track, the CV and gate one, turns this from a self-contained box into the centre of something larger. Seven tracks handle the sample-based sound generation; the last one reaches out to control synthesisers and modular gear beyond the Bullfrog itself, sequencing other instruments while staying part of the same idea. It's a small feature that changes the instrument's whole relationship to the rest of a setup. Sound Design Potential The instrument's real strength lies less in offering endless menus and more in giving you immediate control over the few parameters that matter. Sound design here is performative rather than administrative; you shape in real time, not scroll through pages to find the right screen. It suits producers working in genres where rhythm, texture and evolving patterns are the whole point. The five-second maximum sample length per voice looks limiting on paper, but you can double it by halving the sample rate when a longer recording is unavoidable. In practice, it was rarely a real limit, more a constraint that concentrates the mind. We live in an age that confuses unlimited storage with unlimited imagination; the Bullfrog Drums quietly disagrees, and so do I. The less I have, the more I think. [quote align=right text="We live in an age that confuses unlimited storage with unlimited imagination; the Bullfrog Drums quietly disagrees, and so do I. The less I have, the more I think"] Tough Enough For The Road The build is excellent: a sturdy aluminium case around the electronics that feels designed for real use rather than careful display. It’s the same chassis as the Bullfrog synth unit. It's built for the kind of hands-on, repeated abuse a working musician puts gear through, and it carries the same tactile, education-meets-performance instinct as the rest of the Bullfrog line into its physical design. It sits comfortably alongside Erica Synths' growing hardware catalogue, including a forthcoming performance mixer built to complete the Bullfrog environment. All samples are from a 1978 Korg MS-20. Everything is played and modelled in real time. What Else Is Out There? The Bullfrog Drums sits in a market crowded with compact groove boxes, samplers and hardware sequencers, and its answer to that crowd is refreshingly narrow: it doesn't try to be everything. It costs around €600, which puts it directly against the Elektron Digitakt II and Polyend Tracker+ on price, while offering fewer tracks (7+1 vs 16) and a shallower spec sheet on paper. But the fact is, it doesn’t win on specs against those machines, but on the thing specs don't measure: how fast you get from an idea to sound with no menu between them, or from imagining a groove to the actual creation. Its educational framing is also, in practice, a kind of honesty rare in this market. Beginners genuinely can learn sampling, sequencing and the basics of electronic music production through an interface that doesn't punish curiosity; more experienced hands will still find plenty of room to do serious work.  That's a harder trick than it sounds, and the instrument pulls it off , the walk from "exploring for the first time" to "stage-ready" happens faster than you'd expect from something wearing the word educational on its sleeve. Conclusion The Erica Synths Bullfrog Drums succeeds because it never pretends to be simpler than it is, which, arguably in an industry built largely on that pretence, counts for something.  Its strengths are the hands-on workflow, the sound quality, the flexible sample engine, the sequencing, and a build that will survive being loved. A future firmware update could stand to widen the trig condition options, a limitation shared across Erica's other drum machines, all drawing from the same set of conditions and percentage conditions, and a more extreme saturation gain would suit users like me, always chasing something heavier.  If there's one feature we'd have wanted, it's a second individual output for a sound of our choosing; given the price, its absence is easy enough to forgive. Sometimes less really is more, and sometimes it's just less , the Bullfrog Drums has the good sense to know which is which. [rating buy="Erica Synths Bullfrog Drums" price="€600" link="https://www.ericasynths.lv/bullfrog-drums-3719/" build="5" value="3" versatility="4" sound="5" ease_of_use="4.5" overall="4.5" text="A versatile sample-based performance instrument that proves the Erica Synths Bullfrog Drums is far more than an educational drum machine."] [social-links heading="Follow Attack Magazine" facebook="https://www.facebook.com/attackmag" twitter="https://twitter.com/attackmag1" instagram="https://www.instagram.com/attackmag/" youtube="https://www.youtube.com/user/attackmag" soundcloud="https://soundcloud.com/attackmag" tiktok="https://www.tiktok.com/@attackmagazine"] [product-collection]

  ListenShow Notes

Recent guests on Attack Magazine. Study who booked and why before you pitch.

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.