Beat DRMR Drum Rompler VST/AU Plugin Relased (KVRDC2018)

Beat Magazine has released Beat DRMR, a freeware drum rompler virtual instrument in VST plugin and AU plugin formats for digital audio workstation applications on PC and Mac.

Beat DRMR is a drum rompler, meaning that it contains pre-loaded drum sounds which can’t be substituted with external samples. However, the good news it that Beat Magazine managed to pack the instrument with a whopping 2,136 of royalty-free electronic drum hits. These are spread across 178 individual drum kits and sourced from various hardware drum machines and synthesizers such as the Arturia DrumBrute, Elektron Analog Rytm, JoMoX AirBase 99, and others.

The user interface features sixteen drum pads, with individual volume, pan, attack, and decay controls for each drum channel located below the pads. At the bottom of the UI, you’ll find the global filter, reverb, and output volume controls, along with the pitch modulation section. The preset browser is located at the very top of the interface. The control layout is well done for the most part, apart from the attack and decay knobs which are just too sensitive. Unfortunately, this is a known issue with Maize Sampler which was used as the platform for developing Beat DRMR.

The most important feature of Beat DRMR, though, are the included drum samples. The provided sounds are mostly oriented towards techno and similar styles of electronic music. The sound quality is very good and the samples are conveniently organized into kits based on the source drum machine, or their general sound character. They are perfect for jamming and coming up with ideas for electronic grooves. I’ve had a lot of fun trying out different kits and came up with some interesting drum loops in the process. One drawback worth pointing out is that the kits are provided as-is, meaning that you can’t combine the samples from different kits. However, this can be overcome by using multiple instances of the plugin with different kits loaded.

Beat DRMR is Beat Magazine’s entry in KVR Developer Challenge 2018. The voting phase ends on September 30th and the winners will be announced in early October. What are your favorite entries in this year’s KVRDC? Let us know in the comments section below!

Beat DRMR is available for free download via KVR Audio (1.14 GB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/AU plugin format for Windows & macOS).