Drum plugins

Where to start with this? I’m a fan of synthesized drums. I remember back in the day using Stomper to make my own non-realtime synthesized drum samples. Now we have many more options, although drums seem to still be largely the domain of the sampler.

I used to use a plugin called Waldorf Attack VST way back in the day. This plugin is long deprecated and I don’t think it even installed last time I tried it on a modern Windows machine. I went looking for alternatives and I think that E-Phonic Drumatik is the best drum synth to replace it. Apparently there is something called Stroke Machine that was developed by one of the devs that wrote Waldorf Attack https://www.kvraudio.com/product/stroke-machine-by-franke-music It’s no longer online so I will have to track it down.

Apart from that I’m using a bunch of what I call MPC-alikes. So many drum samplers are sort of like an Akai MPC with a 4×4 pad matrix and some drum layers.

My favorites are Speedrum and the venerable Tal-Drum. I think Tal is slightly more featured but is a bit more expensive if that matters to you greatly. Honorable mentions go to Geist from Fxpansion but it’s long discontinued now and unsupported. There may be others that I’m forgetting but these are my main pics. I used to use NI Battery but that’s now discontinued as well.

Looping and slicing is another area that requires (IMO) different plugins. LiveSlice is one of my favorites but again it’s discontinued and I never did find a full version of the latest 1.5 release. Geist has a big overlap here but again is not current. One thing I wanted to do was slice incoming audio and re-trigger it. I came across Devine Machine Lucifer but I was not able to find a copy to try out. Another slicer was a PD patch that can be found here https://www.katjaas.nl/slicejockey/slicejockey.html

There is a great video of it in action there on Katja’s site.