The Crow Hill Company is currently offering the Demon Drop #001 Circuit Drums plugin for free download, and the offer is due to expire in 36 hours at the time of writing.
Circuit Drums is a Windows and macOS release for AU, VST, VST3, and AAX.
You can access the download by signing up for The Crow Hill Company’s mailing list on the product page.
The developer describes the plugin as a “rarefied collection of electronic drums created from analog and vintage modular sources, processed through classic vintage equipment, housed in an extraordinary interface designed to dial-up the demon in your drums.”
There are eight audio demos on the product page, and the drums sound slamming in a pleasingly retro way, while still clearly having applications in modern productions.
Circuit Drums features eight analog-style, frequency-modulated drum kits. It also has momentary and latch-based performative FX, real-time digital circuitry and speaker emulation.
The release is rounded out by a Limiter, Distortion, Compression, Reverb, and Host-Synced Delay.
The Circuit Drums control scheme features the following: Volume, Tune, DAC, Limiter, FX, Drum Pads and Repeats.
You can access more features by hovering over the screen at the top right, such as preset browsing and additional parameters.
The Crow Hill Company states that the DAC will satisfy those who are missing the crunch that comes with the conversion from vintage gear, saying “use our in-built converter to fulfil all your noisy and aliasing needs.”
You can create your own custom tunings by playing any drum or cymbal and tweaking the tuning control. The volume of the kit parts operates in the same manner.
The Crow Hill Company describes Demon Drop #001 Circuit Drums as “the first of many”. It’s not clear if future Demon Drops will continue the drum machine theme or branch out into other instruments.
The developer suggests that you “Grab this devilish blighter while you can.” The product specs list NKS as “coming soon”, so perhaps the release will transition to a paid release after the 48-hour offer is up, although the developer doesn’t specifically say as much.
Circuit Drums is compatible with macOS Catalina 10.15 through to Sonoma 14.x (Apple Silicon and Intel-compatible), as well as Windows 10 through 11.
The plugin requires 1.16 GB of free disk space.
Download: Circuit Drums (FREE for 48 hrs – until April 27th)
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