Sound Magic releases Drum One, a FREE acoustic drum kit plugin for digital audio workstations on Windows and macOS.
Drum One is an entirely free drum VST plugin by Sound Magic. It uses a lightweight version of the Supreme Drums ($129) engine to generate acoustic drum sounds.
Since this free virtual instrument uses modeling technology to generate sounds (as opposed to sampling), it comes with a lightweight 80 MB installer. Compared to some deeply sampled acoustic drum kits such as the SSD 5.5 plugin with Steven Slate Drums, that’s tiny.
Another advantage of virtual instruments that rely on modeling is the ability to customize the sounds. One such example is the incredibly versatile EXC!TE SNARE DRUM plugin by The Center for Haptic Audio Interaction Research.
However, Drum One doesn’t let you tweak the drums in fine detail. Instead, it comes with several pre-made presets for each drum component. You can choose between several different kick drums, snares, floor toms, and so on.
You can also adjust the microphone levels (in, out, overheads) for each part of the drum kit. This lets you customize the drum kit and balance the mix according to your preference.
Drum One features a simple transient shaper and a reverb effect. The reverb only offers a dry/wet mix control. You can’t adjust the size, decay, or any other parameters.
Here’s more info from the product page: “Drum One is a free drum kits plug-in utilizing a lite version of Supreme Drums Engine. It is designed to provide high-quality, easy-to-use drum kits to musicians/producers. By using the latest modeling technology, it has a small size which is around 80MB.
Okay. We admit it. We’re giving this incredible drum kit away in hopes of luring you in, of getting you interested in our other products. Yes, surprising as it may sound, we actually would like you to BUY something from us so we can keep the virtual doors open and keep on developing cool new products like our other amazing products like below.“
Drum One is available in VST3 and AU plugin formats for Windows and macOS. Only 64-bit plugin hosts are supported.
The plugin is available for free download from the product page linked below. Read the installation instructions to get the password required to extract the downloaded archive.
Download: Drum One (78.9 MB download size)
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14 Comments
MRG
onModelling? It’s a synthedit rompler with .sf2 files, aka soundfonts, aka samples? Whut?
Pacapaca
onThe original paid version is a hybrid of sampling and modeling.
It’s a reduced version of it.
Frits van Zanten
onI think a warning is due to those that use headphones. The ride is very loud.
GG
onI can’t seem to find a link to any samples of the sounds of this VST. I’d like to hear what it sounds like before downloading and installing.
Am I missing something?
Psolkaiyn
onHmm, the download button on the page for this plugin seem to link to a .zip file download that is password encrypted, but password is given so I can decrypt and install it. Perhaps there was a mistake in the site somewhere?
Psolkaiyn
onAha, nevermind. Make sure you read ALL of the download instructions on the page very carefully…
b
onMac Users:
• To open the encrypted zip file, I had to use Stuffit Expander.
• The plugin didn’t pass the au-validation with my logic version 10.5.1.
Zak
onI strongly recommend lowering the volumes of the drums before you try it. The cymbals/rides/hats in particular are far too loud.
This is a bit sloppy on behalf of the developer, but the kit itself actually sounds pretty good and can be useful for a lot of things.
H△$△I
onjust crashes my Ableton 10 (macOS10mojave). and wtf is Yichi Wang?
Konmario Romeo
onPassword is C
Michal Ochedowski
onA good rule is to always have a limiter on the master bus, no matter how small or how big task you’re currently performing. This comes especially handy with new plugins. Thomas Mundt’s LoudMax is a great free option.
rek
onthe sound is good, but the GUI doesn’t work on Yabridge/Arch Linux. (most plugins work on yabridge)
David Paskey
onI followed the instructions, but after downloading on Windows 10 PC I can’t access the file. The file download attempt, it appeared as a blank folder. The second time, the Drum One zipped folder appeared, but trying to open it led to another error. It never prompts me to enter the password. Has anyone experienced this? I’m using Windows 10’s native extractor. Thanks.
N
onTHANK YOU