Fanan Team releases Kitton 2, a freeware drum machine plugin.
Drums are the backbone of so many popular genres. If you’re on the hunt for a lightweight drum machine, then Fanan’s Kitton 2 might fit the bill for you.
Kitton 2 is a General MIDI compatible drum plugin that comes with 20 kits. The kits have a good bit of variety between them and are sampling acoustic drum kits that you might find in a band context.
You will find kits for rock, general usage, electronic music, jazz, pop, and a lot more. Each of the sounds in a kit has a good amount of tweaking and control behind it as well.
Six effects allow you to sculpt a kit in use without having to reach for external processors. Users have access to saturation, compression, reverb, delay, and stereo widening.
There is also a unique filter developed by Fanan called the Zelda filter which can be used for further tone sculpting. Drum sounds can be further manipulated with EQ and pitch shifting.
The implementation of the pitch shifting is done on a per-voice basis, which can be handy for having a lower snare sound while keeping your kick and hats at their original pitch.
If you’ve got a plethora of free drum grooves, this is readily usable. Being General MIDI compatible leaves it fairly flexible, as the old standard is still fairly popular for key mapping on drums.
The drums themselves sound decent, they certainly aren’t exhaustively captured drum sounds captured in a high-tech studio. Kitton 2 very well could serve as a fun source of inspiration, however.
This certainly won’t replace your EZDrummer or Superior Drummer licenses, but for beginners or folks just wanting a decent drum machine, this is a fun little freebie. You might not use it in an ultra-technical djent song, but it could be a good bit of fun to implement in some pop or Sound Canvas-inspired songs.
As far as compatibility, Kitton 2 is only available for Windows computers. Supported plugin formats are likewise fairly slim, with only VST being supported at the time of this writing. Mac users will have to look elsewhere, sadly.
Download: Kitton 2
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