Noizefield Releases Free Kick Machine VSTi Plugin

Noizefield has introduced Kick Machine, a freeware kick drum generator instrument in VSTi plugin format for Windows. The plugin was developed using FlowStone and will only work in 32-bit plugin hosts on Windows.

Kick Machine was released by Noizefield who teamed up with Infected Sounds, the developers of the Gasolina1 virtual synthesizer. In terms of available features, Kick Machine reminds me quite a bit of the BIGROOMKIXSYNTH plugin by Hinton & Fairchild (which was included as one of our top 40 VST plugin picks from 2014). Both plugins were developed using the same platform (SynthMaker/FlowStone) and offer two very similar feature sets.

Being a subtractive synthesizer at its core, Kick Machine features two oscillators (with sixteen waveforms on offer), three envelopes (pitch, amplitude and click), click and oscillator filters, a simple 3-band equalizer, global drive and volume controls, and a built-in bitcrusher effect. The current (1.0) version of the plugin comes with 47 factory presets and the additional INIT preset which is pretty much a clean slate for building your kicks from scratch. Unfortunately, the quality of the available presets isn’t exactly great. The preset kicks are not terrible, either, but you’ll definitely need to do some fine tuning and external processing (EQ, compression, etc.) in order to make these kicks fit into a modern electronic mix.

The instrument is completely free to download and use, although you’ll need to be a registered Noizefield user in order to grab your free copy of Kick Machine. The registration process is completely free and it only requires a valid email address. It’s worth noting that Noizefield is offering several other interesting VST plugins on their website (also free to download for registered users), such as the 4 Tune virtual analog synthesizer which was one of our top freeware picks last year.

Kick Machine is available for free download via Noizefield (2.95 MB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit VSTi plugin format for Windows, made with FlowStone).