In Summary

Hardware drum machines and virtual drum instruments can deliver beats in different ways, but Klevgrand’s OneShot sets out to do the work of either for the DAW and beyond. We check out its features and sounds for ourselves to see what it can do.

Going Deeper

Mention the words “drum machine”, and some will picture some kind of desk or rack hardware designed to deliver overtly electronic programmed drum sounds. Others will think of playable pads or kit systems with onboard sounds for electronic or acoustic drum flavours.

A third way can be the kind of drum virtual instrument for the DAW that can do the job of either. For studio musicians, this has a load of advantages over using hardware, with the sheer breadth of sounds and deep editing of those being just two. Many of these land with libraries of pre-played or programmed MIDI, but a number of musicians will play virtual sounds with whatever real triggers they have lying around. For these people, real pads are a bonus for humanistic drums, but equally anything that speaks MIDI can be used to get the performance in.

Using Klevgrand OneShot

Klevgrand’s latest creation is described as a “complete drum hub environment”, following the developer’s mantra of friendly instruments backed up with enough extended features to keep happy anyone who needs to tweak further. A quick look at OneShot’s GUI reflects this, with a ‘tiled’ layout of Slots that invite you to hit them just like a real sample pad!

In the video we use OneShot to provide the foundation for an electronic track, using some tweaked hybrid kit pieces to drive the track. Whether played with live input or triggered from the timeline, we show its simple mixer with two effects returns, along with addictive channel and master insert effects. These mean that the drum mix might only ever need to happen in one window…

Whether you’re a drummer, producer, or engineering composer, OneShot sets itself apart from other VIs. On one hand it has extensive features for live MIDI inputs, making it just like a ‘soft’ brain for hardware pads and triggers. On the other, it can sit in the mix taking its hits from the timeline just like any other drum VI. This helps it to do mechanised, hard-edged electronica as well as organic acoustic sounds as well. Coupled with a simple mixer with just enough flexibility to keep engineers happy as well, OneShot could be the one drum VI to keep everyone happy.

Klevgrand OneShot Key Features:

• Fast workflow for quickly creating a playable kit.

• A large collection of acoustic and electronic sounds, with over 8000 meticulously recorded samples from different styles and locations.

• Over 200 curated presets in many different acoustic and electronic styles.

• Super realistic drums with velocity layering, round robin, humanize and choking.

• Separate controls for volume, pan, pitch, FX inserts, FX sends and more on each instrument slot.

• Built-in effects: EQ, compressor, bus compressor, distortion, algorithmic reverb, convolution reverb, stereo widener, bitcrusher, delay and finalizer.

• Add your own samples easily by using drag-and-drop.

• Multi-out routing for further processing in the DAW.