Hortator

A dedicated 8-track drum machine built on Felucca. The name is the perfect joke: on a Roman galley, the hortator set the beat for the rowers — “Felucca is a Nile sailboat; this is its drummer.” A blackletter logo and, nerd detail, a benchmarking suite inside the device itself.

Workflow

Step and live drum programming, song chaining, and performance FX. The browser 3D simulator runs the real firmware as WASM over an FM-1 rendered in three dimensions — “play it in the browser first,” its own site recommends.

Engines & what it emulates

Modeled 808 and 909 (kicks, snares, claps, hats, toms, cowbell, cymbal, rim, clave, conga); full ports of Plaits’ percussion algorithms; 2-operator FM percussion (bells, metallic toms, woodblocks, zaps, FM kicks); MEMB, a physically modeled struck membrane (DaisySP: toms, timbales, tabla); samples; and from Mutable also Grids as a pattern generator and Streams as a compressor for ducking/pumping. Emilie Gillet is credited in the README (Grids GPL-3.0+, Plaits/Streams MIT).

What sets it apart

• 64-step sequencer with per-track length/division/swing, accents, PROB, RATCH, alternate-bar fills, and bar-quantized mutes; MOTION (knob recording); a 16-row SONG mode.
• 2 syncable LFOs per track (10 waves, morph); per-track DIST, SLICER, and RESON — string/tube/chord resonators plus a bell/bar/plate MODAL — and filter envelope sweeps.
• PERFORM layer (master FX, FILTER/CRUSH/THROW/DEPTH macros); USB audio; 4 projects; never turns on the BLE radio.

Status & caveats

Beta — it ships stable-tagged but its README says beta, and it is untested on most hardware. For disasters there’s a boot-mode restore from a Mac with no extra hardware, documented in docs/RECOVERY.md.