Drum is an eight-track drum computer.

We made Drum for ourselves. We wanted a deep drum synth with a sequencer good enough to lock any knob to any step, and a reverb and a delay every track can send to. We loved picking and generating sounds, patterns, tracks and whole scenes, and keeping what we liked. We wanted every track on its own output, and the finished beat out as audio or MIDI with one drag. We couldn't find all of that in one place, so we built it. Now we're sharing it with you.

Four scenes from the library, exactly as Drum's own export sheet rendered them. No mastering, no other plug-in.

A kick is mostly tone. A hat is mostly noise. A snare is somewhere between. So every track has a TONE row, a NOISE row and one line between them, the MIX: drag the point and the drum changes character. The tone is an oscillator or an object: SINE, TRI, SAW or SQUARE, or a drum HEAD, a BAR, a PLATE or a BELL struck, or a STRING plucked, each ringing the way the real one does. The tone's filter sweeps home over its own DECAY. Under them, the track's own LFO and the chain the track goes through: DISTORTION, EQ, DYNAMICS and DUCKING. PUNCH brings a hit's front forward or its tail up without touching the peak, and DUCKING dips the track under another track's hits, in time with the tempo.

Choose the parts (DRUMS, PERC, BASS, SYNTH, FX) and a genre, or leave it ANY. GEN writes a scene, a track, a sound or a pattern from those seeds, by rules, not a trained model: each genre has its players and the rules they keep. Every pitch it writes shares one key, so a tom run or a bass line fits the rest. PICK draws one from the library instead. Don't like it? Undo is the whole machine, 64 points back.

Every step has its own velocity, timing, chance and condition, repeats with a roll shape, a slide into it, and how far it may vary. A pattern runs up to four pages, and each track has its own length. DENSITY thins a pattern to its skeleton or fills in the ghost notes.

Select a step, hold Cmd and change anything: that step keeps its own value, and the track's stands. Any knob or choice of the sound locks this way, and a step can play a sound of its own. Hold Option and drag a knob instead, and the track's LFO moves it, as far either way as you drag. Seven waves, from a smooth SINE to a wandering DRIFT, at any rate from 1/64 to 16 bars, turning freely and holding at each note value as you pass it, running with the song or starting again at every hit. The two work together: on a locked step, the lock is the value the LFO swings around.

Each pad sends to a reverb and a delay. Under the steps, the reverb has a type, a size, a decay and a tone, and ducks under the dry beat; the delay has a type, a time, a spread, a feedback and a tone. Then DISTORTION on the whole mix, and MASTER: a glue compressor and the level. The beat leaves the plug-in mixed.

The scene mix, a track stem, a single hit, all stems, the kit, or MIDI: every one is a row you drag into the DAW or click to save. Audio is 24-bit WAV at the host's rate. No bounce in the DAW first. Or keep it live: eight separate outputs, MIDI notes that play the tracks, and SEQUENCER OFF, which lets your DAW's MIDI clips play the beat.

For you if you program drums in a DAW and want them mixed and ready without leaving one window. Not if you'd rather browse sample packs: Drum makes its sounds.

DAY for the desk, DAWN for a bright room, DUSK for the studio, NIGHT for the stage. The same layout in all four; each opens the full picture.