Dark VX Kick Drum is a freeware sample based acoustic kick drum VSTi plugin virtual instrument for Windows and Mac OS based host applications, developed and released by Chokehold.
The instrument’s GUI panel features four kick drum channels (dry, compressed, sub and room) which can be balanced using the on-screen mixer controls. Each of the four kick drum channels features four velocity layers, whereas the two middle velocity layers in each channel come with an additional set of three round robin variations (per velocity layer) for more realistic performance. That adds up to eight kick drum samples channel.
Additional controls include a master reverb amount slider, per-channel mute buttons and the main output slider which controls the overall volume of the instrument. The samples are triggered via MIDI (note D1) and respond to note velocity (a detailed velocity map is available on the product page linked below). The plugin features a single stereo output and there’s no way to process the individual channels separately.
Although the plugin might not seem very versatile it first, it is actually rather useful for several different mixing scenarios. Obviously, Dark VX Kick Drum can be used as a standard kick drum module for rock and metal music projects. However, the sub channel (when soloed) can be used for layering underneath acoustic or electronic drum tracks, adding body and oomph to the main kick drum layer. Same goes for the compressed and room channels which can be used to color the sound of recorded drum tracks, without being used as the central kick drum source.
The included samples sound very nice and they’ve been processed with some interesting hardware gear such as the Great River 32EQ and the Solid State Logic 611EQ. The samples used for the room channel were processed with the Lexicon LXP Room reverb unit for added ambience.
If you find this plugin useful, you should definitely also check out the Black Noh Snare freebie snare module which was crafted by the same developer. For more acoustic drum samples, take a look at our round-up of free drum sample libraries.
Download
Dark VX Kick Drum is available for free download via Chokehold’s website (6.3 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VSTi/AUi plugin format for Windows & Mac OS, made with Maize Sampler).
Last Updated on February 15, 2015 by Tomislav Zlatic.
