An Underrated Classic

DRM Drums serves up over 380 drum samples from a vintage Vermona DRM drum machine. All samples have been lovingly recorded through an API pre-amp with every sound boasting eight round robin variations and four accent (velocity) layers!

Original vintage DRM drum machines are quite hard to come by; they were originally manufactured by Vermona in 1986 and appear to be influenced by the iconic 606 and 808 drum machines. Although DRM is an abbreviation for ‘Digital Rhythm Machine’, the sound generation is in fact fully analogue! 12 analogue drum voices are available: kick drum, 3 toms, 2 snares, 2 hi-hats, claves, cowbell, cymbal and a very interesting sounding analogue clap…

DRM Drums contains fully pre-mapped drum kit patches for use with Kontakt 5 and Battery 3. Each kit makes extensive use of multiple velocity layers, round robin sample playback and choke groups to create a truly expressive sample instrument.

All 384 drum samples are included as raw 24-bit wav files, carefully trimmed and labelled, making it easy for those who want to build their own drum kits.

The Drum Kit

Carefully thought-out Battery and Kontakt kits include 384 Vermona DRM drum samples which have been recorded clean through an API 512c pre-amp. The kit includes 8 round robin samples per sound as well as 4 accent / velocity layers per hit…

Round Robin

Due to the DRM’s analogue nature, subtle differences in tone are heard in the sound each time a drum is triggered. Because of this we felt it necessary to record 8 ’round robin’ samples and 4 accent / velocity layers per sound – to help capture the ‘movement’ created by random analogue behaviour.