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Arturia offers Augmented Mallets Play for FREE until January 2

By 19 Comments3 Mins Read
Arturia’s New Augmented Mallets Play Virtual Instrument is FREE Until January 2, 2025

On Friday, December 20, Arturia launched the Augmented Mallets Play virtual instrument and made it available for free download until January 2, 2025. 

The Christmas freebie is a macOS and Windows plugin for VST, AAX, AU, NKS (64-bit only), and standalone formats.

Arturia states that the free license is valid until January 2. 

YouTube video

After that date, it’s not clear whether the plugin will be transferred to a paid format, simply removed from availability, or perhaps even part of a wider release. 

Arturia has us covered with a trio of tuned percussion instruments, including marimba, vibraphone, and celeste.

The dev has embedded audio demos featuring all the above instruments on the product page and six demo songs in various styles. 

There’s also an official playthrough demo on YouTube, along with several user-made demos. 

YouTube video

I must admit this type of tuned percussion is not something I’ve spent a huge amount of time implementing into my productions.

However, listening to the demos, it’s clear that these instruments can cover quite a wide range of sonic territory, with pop, trap, neo-soul, lo-fi, and more being featured. 

Arturia describes Augmented Mallets Play as a dynamic hybrid mallet instrument.

This refers to the fact that there are two sound layers in each preset and two sound sources per layer. 

You get 50 presets to work some percussive magic with. Each instrument has pure, bowed, and prepared articulations, and various techniques have been explored, such as using coins, damped, tremolo, and more. 

Arturia has also included a Morph control, which moves between the two layers, interacting with up to eight parameters per preset. 

There are also seven macros to work with, namely Time, Color, Motion, FX A, FX B, Reverb, and Delay.

As you can hear in the audio demos and the playthrough, these effects can produce some stunning and even surprising sounds from the featured instruments. 

The way Arturia’s Matt Paull interacts with the macros in between playing on the YouTube playthrough really highlights what the plugin is capable of. 

To get your hands on Augmented Mallets Play, you’ll need to create (or login to) an account on Arturia’s website. 

This required quite a bit of a process, including a mandatory signup for the Arturia newsletter. 

Arturia then emailed me straight away, and after confirming my email address, I was linked to a page where I could add the license to my account. 

You’ll also have to install the Arturia Software Center and log in. Then, you can activate and install the plugin. 

Check out the deal: Augmented Mallets Play (FREE until January 2nd – Arturia account & Arturia Software Center required)

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Stephen is a musician and journalist who hails from Melbourne, Australia. He learned everything he knows about production from Google and used that vast knowledge to create a series of records you definitely haven’t heard of.

19 Comments

        • Klaus Michl

           on

          I don’t understand, why you don’t like them. The products have a very low cpu consumption, they have soundpacks from world class sounddesigners like Richard Devine and you can use the soundpacks even if you don’t have the full version of the software.
          I was looking forward for that gift from AAS. It is the third time a got it and I think it is one of the best christmas freebies.
          For anyone starting out with AAS I would recommend a soundpack for chromaphone 3 from Richard Devine.

          Reply

          • Numanoid

             on

            In my experience AAS soundsets do not have low CPU usage, the latest String Studio soundsets spike my CPU for the most part (Windows 10, i5 computer)

            With so many soundsets now I wish AAS would update their player, as a minimum to be able to tag presets, or sort them according to genre (pad, lead, bass, etc). I’ve got over 3000 patches in my AAS Player, but not being able to sort them, have become a chore for usage.

            Reply

            • Paramita

               on

              ABSOLUTELY ! AAS has perhaps the WORST UX and GUI out there, shocking !!
              With the massive amount of plugins these days, that there are still no preset browsers with favourites and tags, baffles me. And that is just the beginning of the issues with AAS.
              If you like the sounds and can deal with the lack of functions, then great for you of course.

              Reply

  2. CoopMusic247

     on

    This sounds pretty good. I went to go check out the full product, but its just a teaser basically. Great sounds in there though. AAS on the other hand does have usable sounds. I never end up opening it though. I like their Strum package better than any other virtual guitarist setup though.

    Reply

  3. sam

     on

    guys and gals, any recommendations on what to get on plugin boutique for cheap? still trying to get UA tape monthly freebie, but don’t really need much rn, so i’m a bit lost on what to get

    Reply

  5. alex

     on

    Fracture Sounds has just released Church Organ, a new Blueprint Series instrument for Kontakt Player:

    fracturesounds.com/product/blueprint-church-organ/

    Reply

  6. Marcel

     on

    Nice product, great sound quality, as always with Arturia. Unfortunately, most Arturia products are very CPU hungry and don’t run very well on my (not so new) laptop. The same goes for this one.

    Reply

  8. shane

     on

    so this is just a play version with no deep editing .. i wonder if the full version will come out or it’ll just stay a minor release (compared to the other augmented series)

    Reply

  9. user19

     on

    Very high CPU usage on laptop i5 16GB RAM, Cakewalk DAW, Presonus ASIO native driver. I can run 2 instances in my DAW at the same time without spikes. Running a third one causes the CPU to spike to 100% and I get glitches. Also, like with most Arturia VST’s, I get quite high memory usage. Changing the buffer size to 1024 samples helps just a little bit.

    Reply
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