Majetone’s AC08 Roland 808-style drum sampler instrument (normally £25) is now available for free at Pulse Audio until March 1, 2025.
The drum machine requires the full version of Kontakt and, unfortunately, doesn’t work on the free Kontakt Player.
AC08 is quite a unique plugin, as it’s an acoustic recreation of the hitmaking Roland 808 drum machine.
I’ve gotta hand it to Majetone for coming up with the quirky idea of sampling acoustic instruments to recreate the analog synthesis sounds from the original Roland 808.
It’s worth mentioning that Majetone has not attempted to make the samples sound exactly like the Roland 808.
The AC08’s sounds have been sampled in a way that makes them resemble the original unit’s sounds, but you can still very much tell they are acoustic instruments rather than the robotic sound of the 808.
Majetone captured the samples for the AC08 at Big Fig Studio in Buckinghamshire, England.
Like the original 808, Majetone included kicks, snares, hand claps, toms, open and closed hi-hats, cymbals, and percussion.
The AC08’s main panel features close mic faders for kick, snare, tom, percussion, and cymbal buses, as well as overheads, room, and M/S pair close room mic faders.
If you want to change the composition of the buses, then you can go into each individual close mic grouping and mod the sounds in a detailed way, which I think is an important inclusion.
Multiple drum samples go into each fader, for example, four snares and a rim shot, and there are individual channels for each sample in the in-depth controls.
Majetone has also included delay, reverb, bus compression, cut-off filter, pitch control, EQ, highpass and low pass filters, and tape saturation.
It’s clear to me that Majetone has put a huge amount of time into not only capturing the samples but also providing a packed feature set for AC08, ensuring that it can produce a versatile range of sounds.
As you can see, there are several AC08 YouTube demos available, including official demos and a walkthrough that Majetone produced for the plugin’s launch in August 2021.
Scoring the freebie is a bit of a job, and requires installing the free Pulse app.
To nab the freebie, you’ll need to add it to your Pulse Audio cart, fill in all the shipping details, and create an account with an email and password.
After that, you’ll be forwarded to a page that displays a Pulse redemption key and the four-step process for downloading the plugin, which starts with downloading the Pulse app.
Check out the deal: AC08( FREE @ Pulse Audio until March 1st – Full version of Kontakt & Pulse app required)
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