Drum synth

OneTrick SIMIAN

You can't work on most modern music without a drum beat, and it's something that computers have been able to help with for a long time. Even the humble Commodore 64 was great at drums. At a time when the cost of a drum machine was substantial, Commodore's bread-bin home computer could run a three-channel drum machine from a low-cost compact cassette called MicroRhythm. It may not have been a Simmons SDS-V, but it was pure, unrivaled 8-bit chunkiness. The Simmons SDS-V was also synonymous with the 1980s, as professional drummers replaced their acoustic kits with space-age hexagonal pads. It too was driven from its own, sound engine which was famous for producing space-age alien shooting tom fills. but rather more expensive, and it's this that OneTrick SIMIAN hopes to emulate.

OneTrick SIMIAN is a VST3 synth plugin that's been developed to recreate the original 10 sounds produced by the Simmons computer, including the kick drum, snare drum, claves, and claps, and especially the lo-fi samples for the cymbals. On top of these unique sound generators, which are all available consecutively and will need to be programmed from your MIDI device or application, there's a low-pass filter, an envelope, and an amplifier section with overdrive. The output can even be compressed through a 1176-style limiter, which was itself a costly device at the time, and the output can sound absolutely brilliant. All the settings are saved as a "kit" and 33 factory kits are included by default. The plugin is open source, but you'll need to either build it yourself, use the tagged "free" version, or pay a reasonable fee for the supported commercial version. This seems a great way to fund a niche project such as this, especially when there are so few drum synths that sound so good, and none on Linux. It's something every finger-tapping Linux user should try.

Project Website

https://punklabs.com/ot-simian

The drum synth even includes a gated reverb so you can recreate that drum break from Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight."

Audio sample editor