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I bought into the hate for in rack percussion when I was first getting started and bought a drum machine and immediately regretted it. It takes up more room on the desk. It's another power supply, bag, and cables needed to carry to gigs. It's more wires and connections to remember to make at the show. People say it can do what in rack can do, but it's just not true. Yes, it can make drum sounds and can even have accents. Yes you can program sequences and store multiple sequences to switch between. Yes it can be clocked from your system or be a clock for your system. That's about it though. It can't be immediately tweaked and adjusted to fit an improvised set. It cant react to changes you make in the melody as you make those changes, or build and swell and fall with an LFO that is building dynamics within your set. It is not immediate and it is not a part of your system. It is a thing on the side that needs to be adjusted constantly or preprogrammed methodically to not just be a constant rhythm marching through your set and not allowing it to breathe and move. Yes, it will cost you more money, but what you get is miles beyond what a drum machine can do. That argument is like saying don't build a modular synth, just buy a keyboard synth. It completely ignores the whole point of modular. The setup I am building towards will be about $10k and it will have one acid bass line with a simple VCO, filter, distortion, delay. It will have a kick drum that uses three different modules to get the shape and flexibility I want. It will be using Erica Synths Sample Drum with two different noise samples being triggered at a time(and the two samples being triggered cycle via CV from Mimetic digitalis for variety/accents) and crossfaded into one voice. It will have high hats that probabilistically cycle between two variable noise sources fed into two low pass gates which are then crossfaded together into a hit and an accent which will also be varied by the gates/triggers sent to the LPGs. There will be multiple feedback sources that can be shaped into tones/textures that can be modulated by the rhythm, or an LFO, or both. Feeding all of it, I have Pams, Knights Gallop, Time Wizard, and Bin Seq feeding two different rhythms into a sL3kt to switch between on the fly, so I can be shaping/modifying one rhythm while the other is playing. They will also be providing timing for the bass line, effects, feedback shaping etc. From Sl3kt the triggers get fed into Idum which can mutate/modify the rhythm at will. I have mutes to shut down or change gate routing at will. There will be effects after all this, but the effects could be after your drum machine if you wanted to do it that way(which you should). The point of my rig is to be able to play it spontaneously and be able to shape and shift the rhythms to fit the feel of whatever I am doing in that moment. I am an improvisational person so this is ideal for me and was the whole draw of modular synthesis for me. I'm sure that a drum machine fits a lot of peoples needs, but the way in rack drums are tossed out as unreasonable is silly to me as the entire point of modular is to build the instrument you want to build.