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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18 Comments
Tjerja
onThe provided download link to the crow hill circuit drums leads to a 504 error / gateway time out.
Gateway time-out Error code 504
Visit cloudflare.com for more information.
2024-04-26 13:44:37 UTC
Can you maybe extend the availability – since no one can download it … ?
Steve Charlton
onIt’s not our promotion but perhaps if you email Crow Hill they might be able to help out. :)
kenny
onsame here Server time out everytime
whormongr
onat least you got a link lol, i haven’t gotten an email back with the link
Numanoid
onI got the link immediately after providing my e-mail, and was able to download (now two hours ago)
Adilbek Temirkhanov
onSuch a mean sounding drum machine, can’t play it without stank face!
Steve Charlton
onHaha.
Vadim
onsounds really nice
a6tmr
onDoes anyone get the email after submitting your address to the site?
Brenny C
onMaybe try a different email address. The first email I used (last night) still has not received the link. I tried another email, a Gmail account address, and the link showed up within 3 mins. Good luck!
C Calvin
onThe extent of personal information the form wants is a tad excessive … name, home address, and phone number.
What, is Christian Henson going to call me for? Nothing. So why is my phone number essential? To sell onwards?
If I did get it, I would run it through VirusTotal.com before opening the file. The Vault one looked a bit dodgy, so I avoided. A shame. I really like a lot Christian does.
Ben
onAgree on the address/phone thing, I hope that doesn’t become a trend for snail-mail spamming (I get enough of that already)
I just gave the classic 123 Fake St answer
fwiw here’s the exe results:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/75e379b8d078a560d212fcc20219be20b75540f993eaf8d9833a433416a3085f
It basically downloads a huge datafile, unpacks it into what looks like an Electron (js) app and then places a VST in a user-specified folder which presumably references said app – it didn’t actually open for me in Ableton since it errored out with an apparent developer-side issue referencing a non-existent file
Michal Ochedowski
onWhen I open the small downloaded .exe file, a separate window pops-up with the question about download directory. I choose the default directory, but the download doesn’t seem to start. The same separate window keeps displaying “Initializing” and nothing happens for a long time. Anyone else has the same problem?
Ben
onI’d imagine try later on, their hosting is probably overloaded
AFAIK if you have the exe it should be able to download the data later, I can’t imagine they would restrict that going forward since ppl would need to (re)install it in various situations
Michal Ochedowski
onThanks for the reply. I’m hoping the same thing about at least having this exe file.
George
onStill no link and time running out.
yambu
onAfter I entered a different e-mail address, I had no problems. Even on an offline system you can use the part, which sounds pretty good, without any problems. Thank you bpb again!
Vlad
onPermanent initializing, any solutions?