Battalion is a sound designer’s dream when it comes to drum plugins, letting you create primarily percussive sounds mixing samples and synthesis using a range of different engines. It contains a slightly overwhelming feature set for editing a given kit preset on a global and per pad level, but after you dig in, it has almost everything imaginable. Almost. It’s the pinnacle of the creative tools Unfiltered Audio have been providing us for the past 10 years. And I’ve finally taken the plunge on this VST after 1 year on the market.
At first glance, Battalion is an eight-voice drum instrument, we’ve seen iterations of that before – right? But looking under the hood, each voice is actually a shape-shifting dual engine: part synth, part sample player with a per pad set of effects.
Selekta
You start with options: 20 different synth models mixed with a sampling engine with four different playback modes. Add to this a range of modulation options, every pad comes wired with its own set of tools: envelopes, LFOs to move, wiggle, detune, distort, or collapse in on itself over time. Add a little modulation to pitch or filter cutoff and you get movement. Add a lot and you get instability. Battalion makes both feel equally valid. And if you’re looking for inspiration, randomisation is your friend.
I just love randomization options in a plugin – and it’s no exception with Battalion, even though the accompanying drumkit presets are all very nice and varied. But to call them drumkits is actually a little confined, since Battalion mixes samples and synth engine generated sounds. So let’s call it an advanced percussive plugin. It really fits my liking in terms of possible output to quickly randomize a preset, as my music revolves around early hip hop and sampling, bridging into more dubby and harder electronic genres as well. So I’m happy with the often extreme, synthetic, metallic, phased and spaced out sounds coming from the synth engines here.
The ability to import your own samples to the sample slot per pad, is also pretty awesome, opening up the plugin for discovery within your own sound libraries and keeping some sort of grounding. I think where a lot of developers miss out is in fact in user customisation like this, so a big hat off to Unfiltered Audio for this one.
On the performance tab / page you can set to what degree you want the performance knob to affect ADSR, pitch for the synthesis and sample engines as well as all editable sequencer settings (fill, pattern, steps etc). This one knob is probably the most powerful one knob in Battalion. It can really take your sound to new places.
Unfiltered DNA
What struck me the most after loading up Battalion the very first time, was the ease with which you can finely tweak or utterly destroy a preset kit using varying degrees of randomization by rolling the dice icon and some performance knob testing. You can randomize the whole preset like this, but also on a “per pad” level, which is very convenient. I don’t think I’ve ever printed a channel to audio this fast, just to go for it again with global randomization, to see what would come out next.
I don’t think I’ve ever printed a channel to audio this fast […] to see what would come out next.
Dice rolling with Battalion is like sitting in front of some kind of portal to an endless abyss spitting out weird, wonderful and scary sound waves. I also felt like this when reviewing Baby Audio’s Atoms synth sort of recently, but I think it’s only fair to also mention Unfiltered Audio’s own synth Lion, a great modular playground which I feel is greatly overlooked in the audio community in general. It also makes for a great companion sharing the same creative DNA and.
Chaos in sequence
Returning to Battalion, it has a built-in sequencer accessible via the tabbed layout at the bottom, and depending on your needs, this is actually a pretty powerful addition. I mostly like to draw or play my own patterns into Ableton Live, but there’s a point to the sequencer here: You can program it poly rhythmically, with anything from 1 to 16 steps PER VOICE, even adding a multiplier, so you can do drills with hi-hats or what you need.
Play the kick drum on 4/4 and hats on a 4/6 pattern, for example. And this is all sitting on a single channel of audio in your DAW, it’s really a lot of rhythmic potential – especially if you hook the sequencer bits up to the performance knob.
It also makes super sense to have the sequencer when auditioning and building a kit by randomizing, since every time you randomise a preset, the whole pattern for all voices is also randomized, sparking ideas instantly. The backside of this, however, is that you can’t keep a sequenced pattern you like while flipping around for new sounds with the global randomizer, so you have to tweak and roll dice per pad if the pattern is for keeps.
One thing missing for me overall in terms of the sequencer, however, is the ability to export a given pattern section as midi. We have this option in a much older drum plugin like Microtonic by Sonic Charge, which is great for creating varied clips or just drum clips in general. I hope to see it in Battalion one day.
Synthesis + sample = limitless
With Battalion the sound per pad is always a potential mix of synthesis and sample. And that’s a great starting point for sculpting sounds. You can go 100% synth and 0% sample, vice versa and anything in between. As mentioned, samples are aplenty in the plugin sample folder, but being able to import your own samples really opens it all up. For the synth part of each sound there are 20 synthesis engines to choose from, with a range of common use cases like kick, snare, hat, fm, additive and so forth.
The sample section has four playback modes: Classic, Granular, Phase warp and Cloner, and you can set and also modulate the start and end points. I’m not sure I can live with the one onboard reverb and delay, respectively, since they’re quite limited (but sound great!), but the fact that they are available on a per pad level, is really fantastic. Good luck trying to build this thing in Ableton, even though I’d say in principle it would be possible to some extent.
A new sound generation
In summary, if you are into sound design at any level, Battalion is for you. This plugin doesn’t even have to be used for only creating beats. You’ll have an endless source of sounds coming out of this thing, the main job is really trying to limit yourself to finding sounds that work within the context of your project. I’ve sampled a load of risers, percussive elements, single hits and even synth like pads to use elsewhere during my first weeks using Battalion, all thanks to the ease with which you can alter a preset using randomization at slight or deeper settings, and by twisting that performance knob right off. It’s just so much fun.
With Battalion, Unfiltered Audio have created a near perfect match for their crazy modular Lion synth, even though I do feel we’re missing a midi export function of some sort to really utilize it fully as a main beat machine in a track. But for that certain Unfiltered sound generation hardly available anywhere else, this could be an essential sound design tool for you too.
Battalion is priced at 199 USD, you may or may not want to wait for the on sale price, often seen well below 100.
