Drum virtual instruments cater for just about every taste on the planet, but getting sounds with an edge for heavier genres can be difficult. Unless you have UJAM Virtual Drummer BRUTE that is. We turn it up to 11 with BRUTE.

Drummer Virtual Instrument Plugins

If you’re a songwriter or production music composer, drum virtual instruments (VIs) are a total godsend when it comes to replicating realistic sounds for any genre. Not only can they sound frighteningly close to the real thing, but also most come with libraries of beats, fills and phrases that let you drag and drop yourself an arrangement within minutes. If you’ve never come across them before, you might be surprised just how much music you hear will have been made using them.

Genre Specific Sounds

Many drum VIs provide pristine sounds that are hard to equal, let alone beat. While that’s great, quite often you have to dig a bit deeper to find the deliberately distorted, detuned sounds that can make a production standout, especially for punk, nu metal, and the alternative end of rock. 

If you are producing a heavy style at home that needs to jump out of the speakers and slap you around the face, you sometimes need an alternative to polite hi fi-flavoured precision. Enter UJAM Virtual Drummer BRUTE…

UJAM Virtual Drummer BRUTE

Virtual Drummer BRUTE is the latest in a quintet of drum VIs from UJAM covering different styles from funk, soul, classic, contemporary, and heavy genres. Virtual Drummer BRUTE is tailor made for anyone producing alt-rock, punk, nu metal, or any other hard-hitting style at home for demos or full-blown productions

At its heart is a library of 31 playing styles, each with 23 phrases and fills totalling 713 variations. These are playable through 5 genre-specific drum kits playing into 6 mix presets recorded through various pieces of desirable vintage and modern gear. The instrument layout is in familiar UJAM-style, with a logical top to bottom signal flow starting with the drummer themselves (MIDI single hits and phrases), followed by kit selection and a broad-brush mix style selector, ending up at the VI’s own mixer. 

In short, if you have any MIDI device you can play BRUTE your way. For non-players, or for anyone who needs to quickly leave it up to BRUTE, the styles and phrases can be auditioned top-right, and dragged and dropped straight into your DAW’s arrange window using the highlighted dotted upper sections of each piano key.

The kit selection and mix preset sections’ buttons and large arc shaped sliders are entirely self explanatory. BRUTE’s main mixer found further down at the bottom is also totally intuitive and here you can also solo and swap out individual kit pieces at the mix stage which I think is one of the single biggest bonuses of using a drum VI either as your primary instrument or as an augmentation to your own recorded drums.

For deeper mix control, BRUTE supports multi-outs for using your DAWs mixer. This is a pro feature, which if nothing else will give you level control beyond BRUTE’s own tiny level pots...The sounds themselves straight out of the back of BRUTE are entirely mix-ready which for 99% of the time won’t need any help from your plugin folder.

Final Thoughts

I really cannot fault the sounds or the workflow of Virtual Drummer BRUTE. Not only is getting hard-hitting, totally mix-ready drums with BRUTE easy, but it’s also fun. For just $99,  UJAM have distilled all of the hard-won tuning and production tricks and handed them to us with no strings attached. If you need produced, hard hitting drums fast from a VI that sounds great, look no further.

Head over to UJAM to check Virtual Drummer BRUTE out now.