Speedrum VST

I’m narrowing down my drum plugin selections finally. I’m interested in working with breakbeats and slicing up drums, but not necessarily in re-arranging or sequencing the loops. Mostly I pull all of the snares from a loop into a pad and layer them or something like that. More like creating a drum kit out of a break instead of resequencing the order of the break itself.

Ok with that out of the way, it kind of makes plugins like Geist kind of overkill. I don’t need the sequencer part of these things. There are two main contenders left now — Tal Drum and Speedrum. They are very similar plugins on the surface, but Tal is much deeper on layer editing and modulation while speedrum is lighter and has a faster interface for certain workflows.

The main killer feature of speedrum that I’ve found that fits my workflow is the ability to drag and drop sections from the slicer to a pad layer directly. My workflow for taking all the snare hits out of a loop and putting them in layers of a single pad is super fast.

In this view you can see the slicer along the bottom of the UI. I was able to drag and drop a section of the sliced break directly to a pad above, and it adds a layer. This is super fast to prototype a drum kit from a break. It sure beats slicing the whole file to sections first and then sorting through them.

Apart from this feature the rest of the plugin is pretty straightforward. FX and controls affect the entire pad not the layer, so there isn’t as much control over the sound as there is with some other plugins. There aren’t any LFOs or other assignable modulators. It’s all pretty straightforward. I think this fits a niche for just getting kits together really fast and not worrying about modulation and deep sound design.

I’ll be using this as a starting point for most of my drum kits now. If I need deeper modulation I will probably pull the same samples into Tal Drum.