Hey Blobby! Good that you replied. I realise now that I forgot to let y'all know how it went so far. I have both the Metal-O-Tron and the Can I Kick It module. You are very right that it's not your standard kick. Fortunately, the large hp count was used very well indeed, on both modules. The maker has refrained from making everything CVable, which looks like a shame at first, but the choices he made work very well.
Here's a few sound examples. First, the basic sound of the Metal-O-Tron. You can hear it at the start of this track. I'm just CVing the filter cutoff here. You can also do decay modulation via CV, e.g. for an open/closed hat effect.
The Metal-O-Tron has an audio in (handy to run another sound through the built-in VCA) and an XOR in. I didn't really get what it did until I ran into the maker of the module by accident. I asked him why there wasn't a CV for the four OSC knobs at the bottom. We had an interesting back-and-forth about how useful that would be, as they are quite sensitive in the upper regions. So I said it'd be cool to change the pitch with it. He pointed out I could do that by sending a pitched OSC into the XOR in. That's what you hear in this one:
Both the long gong-like sound and the 'ta-ta-ta-tak' at the start of the track are the Metal-O-Tron. They are differently pitched. If you listen carefully, you'll hear that the 'ta-ta-ta-tak' also changes pitch. The XOR in takes the output of a bOSC CEM3340 sine output which I use to change that pitch. I'm sending the velocity of the Oxi sequencer to the delay CV to make the gong long and the others short.
The Can-I-Kick-It is fun as well. Mine has a defect where the output volume is around 10dB too low, but I'm getting another one in the mail soon. In the meantime, I have been sending it through Ruina Versio which has a handy trigger able +12dB boost. But of course, that's distorted, which is kind of the purpose of the Ruina in the first place...
The kick has a pitch input, but it doesn't track V/Oct. I work around that by attenuating a V/Oct by around 80%. It then does track reasonably well. It's a little bit fiddly (scale with the attenuator, offset with the pitch knob on the module) but it's good enough for some simple work. It's also got a nice decay mod, i.e. the sort of pitch decay you get on traditional sine based kick drums, and much more. Here's an example of the kick following the pitch of the bass line. It steps in around 0:42. As it's -10dB, use headphones for best effect! The metal sound that starts at 0:14 is the Metal-O-Tron. I played the decay by hand during recording.
Overall, I'm very happy with both modules. I wanted deeper drum modules and it's exactly what I got.
