Vintage Drum Elements is the latest freeware virtual instrument coming from Single Cycle Audio, featuring the sounds of the Yamaha RX5 drum module packed in a nice looking 16-pad virtual drum machine interface.
The instrument is based on a set of one shot samples from the Yamaha RX5 drum module which was quite popular in the 80s. Now, you may love or hate these cheesy old digital drum hits (I happen to be quite a big fan of this type of electronic drums), but there’s no denying that they’re the perfect drum material for any music genre inspired by the decade which gave us “Back to the Future” and Inspector Gadget. Anyone making chillwave, synthpop or any other synth driven style of music should definitely take a closer look at this one.
The user interface is really well built. It’s quite amazing what the developer was able to get out of Maize Sampler, an old program which can be used to turn sample libraries into Windows and Mac OS compatible virtual instruments. As a matter of fact, Vintage Drum Elements has the best interface I’ve ever seen in a Maize Sampler instrument, hands down. All of the necessary controls are implemented on the instrument’s front panel and they’re all responsive and really well implemented. The download pack includes a detailed user manual in PDF format, in case you need a bit of help with some of the editable parameters.
Keep in mind though that this is just a rompler instrument. You can’t load your own samples into it, nor can you build custom kits out of the included samples. But that’s not a big problem, because Vintage Drum Elements comes with a factory set of nine different kits which should provide a good amount of variety for your drum programming endeavors.
The plugin is distributed through Bandcamp on a pay what you want basis. You can download it for free, or choose to send a donation to the developer in order to support his future work. If you like Vintage Drum Elements, you might also want to take a look at Thales Model I Demo which is another lovely virtual instrument by Single Cycle Audio.
Audio Demo
Check out the Vintage Drum Elements audio demo:
Download
Vintage Drum Elements is available for free download via Bandcamp (77.5 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VSTi/AUi plugin format for Windows and Mac OS).
Last Updated on May 15, 2015 by Tomislav Zlatic.
