Plugsound Vol. 3: Drums

this is an excellent vsti. no two ways about it.

its loaded with tons of drums and percussion. high quality acoustic samples, vintage and modern drum synths, its all here. the kits span so may styles that there is something here for pretty much any track im working on.

also, unlike many other drum vsti's, it works very as sound module for my midi drum kit.

the interface is very easy to use, its stable, uses extremely little cpu, its loaded with variety, it sounds excellent, and it sells for a very reasonable price.

i highly recommend it.

This plug has an enormous collection of drum kits. Natural sounding, beat boxes, jazz kits, electro, disco, et cetera. Also half a dozen GM kits and a few hundred percussion instruments.

The different sounds can easily be navigated through cascading menus. Most menus (Jazz Kit 1 .... Jazz Kit 6) end with a bank of all snares or cymbals of that set of kits. Good idea.

I am thoroughly pleased with the sound of it. Low CPU usage too.

My main complaint is that the engine is not multi-timbral, nor does it respond to program changes, nor can you rearrange banks. That means that right now I have a piece that uses one drum kit for the bass and snare, another for hi-hat and bunch of cymbals, and one for just a chinese ride that is not available elsewhere. That is *three* plugins for just the drum set. I'm sorry, that could have been done more elegantly. (I've reflected this in my low score for features.)

The manual is brief, and unfortunately generic for all the plugsound modules, but it's fine in general; comes with a handy chart of all kits and hits.

I got this plug on sale from BigFish Audio for $50. A steal. If you have to pay $100 for it you may want to consider RM IV or so instead which is more powerful, but also more expensive.

(I am using the AU format. Yea for PlugSound for releasing a true native version!)

EDIT The more I'm using this box, the more I'm convinced that reusing the same GUI of the other PlugSound modules for a drum machine was a big mistake. You can not pan individual toms, so right now I have 3 instances running because I want my bass/snare centred, congas right, cymbals left. Not possible with just one plug, even if you found all these sounds in one set. Hence my low score for the GUI.