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Hi Cmb_,

I just returned from Superbooth and promised you to report about it, especially Rabid Elephant. I had been in the main building, i.e. the FEZ Building and arrived at the second last booth and I was getting worried that perhaps Rabid Elephant wouldn't be at the Superbooth, perhaps because Covid? You wouldn't know, right?

That second last booth was Rabid Elephant though :-) The good news, on the stand of Rabid Elephant the Portal Drum module was part of the rack that was on display at Superbooth, so lucky :-)

I will be honest with you, till the moment I met the guy from Rabid Elephant (my apologises to this person, I forgot his name :-( ), I was for myself not too much interested in Rabid Elephant modules however after this very friendly guy explained in a detailed and nice way his modules, I am getting some serious appetite for his modules :-) I still feel they are somewhat expensive however at least I do understand now why you are interested in modules of this brand.

The fellow is pretty young, at least compared to myself however his explanation was clear, good and understandable. Our main focus was, on your request, the Drum Portal module, which he had there on display. I can talk most probably for hours about this module however to summarise this a little bit: It's amazing how much functionality has been packed into this module without being over-complicated and though the module isn't small (sorry I forgot the HP size definitely more than 10 HP, towards 20 HP? Not sure about its size, sorry) it's a hell of a drum module! Besides the "usual drum possibilities", like tone, attack and that kind of stuff there are seriously many (but can't remember them all by heart) extra functions possible with either knobs or the many small switches that have been provided with this module. The knobs are... how to call them? Double knobs? So one knob exists of two elements that can be turned, so per double-knob you can adjust already 2 parameters, that seems a bit odd, the knobs are quite tall, he said he wants to look for a bit smaller versions of that, but after a short while you really get used to it and at least to me it didn't really disturb me from a user interface point of view. For myself I felt the switches were a little too small however his argument was that he didn't want to make them too tall since that would cause the chance of accidentally switch them over while turning for example a knob. That might be indeed a good point (though I never had that with any of my modules ever, so far), so if you don't mind those quite tiny small switches, I guess the user interface is just good, nothing really wrong with it.

The price, he wasn't sure yet, for the North America market he guessed it would be in the 700 - 800+ category somewhere, for Europe he doesn't know yet, because of import taxes, likely higher though. So for me, living in Europe, I feel that's a steep price on the other hand I have to be honest here that looking at what this module can do, that's seriously amazing! So for people who are looking for a serious good drum module that has tons of functionality (no menu diving at all, just knobs and switches) perhaps indeed this is worth it.

I also asked about the availability, that was the question where he had most difficulty to answer that. Not because he didn't want to however because he is missing an IC chip that has a shortage on the current market situation. He told me that in fact the module is ready, just except the IC that's missing. So he couldn't give a clear answer to that, just because he wouldn't really know when he would be able to get that chip on stock.

I have to admit that it is pretty difficult to check out a module for someone because there is the difference in how we each of us are looking at things and how to judge certain experiences. I hope I could be of some help here to you and that at least some of the information is kind of helpful to you.

To summarise this: this drum module is certainly for people who really want a serious drum module that is way beyond the average drum module. This module is able to handle so much, can do so many things, yet it is still very easy to handle its functionalities with a good user interface experience.

Kind regards, Garfield.