Review: Skinnerbox’s Time & Timbre

Skinnerbox is the marathon runner of Berlin’s electronic scene; improvising long live sets with fluid and evolving percussion parts. As it happens, the production duo, Olaf Hilgenfeld and Iftah Gabbai, are also developers who’ve released an innovative Max4Live instrument, Time & Timbre. It provides a fresh approach to creating drum tracks live and in the studio. It’s especially suited to Ableton’s Push controller, with an extended integration experience for sequencing and tweaking your beats!

Before getting started you’ll need to have at least Live 9.1.6 installed and update to Max4Live 6.1.9. Owners of Push should check the controller is selected in the very topmost slot of the MIDI configuration page.

Time & Timbre presents itself as a suite of Max4Live Instrument devices. Within Live’s browser you’ll find Skinnerbox Time (an XoX-style drum sequencer) and five drum-dedicated synths prefixed with ‘Timbre’: BassDrum, Cymbal, HiHat, Snare and Tom. The Timbre instruments are serially inserted in a drum rack after the Time instrument, so you can modulate them with Time’s LFOs. Sound like fun? Indeed it is!

HAMMER TIME!

Time is a six-track step-based sequencer. Where it departs from the norm is in its pattern randomisation functions and independent time/roll metrics for each rhythm track — polymetric mania, ahoy! As you change a part’s meter, the steps graphically shrink or grow to maintain alignment relative to the other tracks. And each track can be independently cleared, randomised, shuffled left or right, and play forward or backward. 

The global Roll setting allows not only different divisors but also different styles such as Gate, Decay, Reverse 1, Reverse 2 and Random. Finally there is a Global swing function (which can link to the groove of other Time instances), a Master Random function and a ‘Morph Master Mike’ parameter, which allows crossfading between A and B states of all controls.

The four LFOs in Time can be mapped to Timbre’s synthesis parameters  and any tweakable parameter within your project (perhaps to the cutoff frequency of Ableton’s Auto Filter inserted over the resulting drum bus). Each LFO sports a variety of wave shapes and can be independently set to sync to the project’s tempo or be free running with a maximum rate of 20Hz.

TIMBRE CUTS

Timbre’s character is unashamedly synthetic in nature and would readily appeal to producers in genres such as Moobatron, Minimal House/Techno, Trap and derivatives of Future Bass. 

For those familiar with the synth drum modules added in Native Instruments’ Maschine 2.x update, the Timbre modules are of the same quality however perhaps not quite as versatile in their overall character, or venture into physical modelling. Having said that, there are oodles of synthesis parameters on offer, some venturing into more experimental territory, including a parameter randomisation function on each module. In fact, the developers encourage using the random function to find sounds in preference to browsing. With a few clicks I could go from abrasive ’80s game console chip-sound percussion to clean-sounding vintage synth drums.