Sorrow

Overview

Sorrow is a drum machine for the Daisy patch.Init(). In addition to the traditional external triggers mode, Sorrow also has internal drum sounds — three drum voices synthesised on the Daisy itself — so it works as a self-contained beatbox with no separate drum modules to patch. It’s based on Mutable Instruments Grids by Émilie Gillet, and named — like everything here — after the nursery rhyme: one for sorrow, two for joy. Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Mutable Instruments or Electrosmith.

The sounds

Grids’ job is rhythm: it reads a map of drum patterns and decides when the kick, snare and hat fire. Sorrow keeps that pattern brain intact and feeds each trigger into a voice synthesised live from Electrosmith’s DaisySP drum models:

• Kick — a SyntheticBassDrum: an FM-enveloped, analog-style bass drum with tone, “dirtiness” and FM-depth controls.
• Snare — a SyntheticSnareDrum: a tone-versus-noise “snappy” balance with a touch of FM.
• Hi-hat — an 808-style HiHat: six square oscillators through a band-pass filter.

The three mix down to the patch.Init() audio outputs, and pattern accents lift a hit’s level. There are no samples anywhere — every sound is generated on the chip.

A toggle sets how Sorrow behaves. In external it runs exactly like an ordinary Grids — no internal sound at all, just 5V kick, snare and hi-hat triggers to fire other drum modules. Switch to internal and the on-board voices take over, mixing straight to the audio outputs.

Every switch into internal also rolls a fresh kit — so an internal → external → internal round-trip re-randomises the three voices’ tuning and character, a quick way to shuffle the drum sounds until one clicks.