In the early 1990s, a guitar-heavy new musical category set out to conquer the hearts and ears of the audience. A new generation of artists would unleash distorted guitars, angry drums, and bucketloads of attitude onto an audience that was suddenly keen to rock out again. Influenced by classic rock of the 1960s and ‘70s, and in opposition to the synthetic aesthetics of the prior decade, bands like Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana, Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains popularized the next incarnation of Rock music. Its playbook is still today the go-to for guitar-heavy hard rocking styles.

Click/Smack
The vintage Sennheiser MD21 from the 1960s emphasizes the attack transients. The source signal was processed with a Manley Voxbox.

Grit/Dirt
Vintage tube and ribbon overhead mics. This is where the character is captured. All the organic noise and resonances that give a warm, coarse and natural quality.

Clean/Nice
Modern high-spec Schoeps microphones that capture the sound ‘as is’. With as little colorization and distortion as possible. For an expensive and glossy character.

DARK
The Stoner: Fat, wide, lower tuning. Slow-roll with this!

DIRTY
The Punk: short and punchy for aggressive double-time fun.

TIGHT
The Crossover: More expression and detail, using e.g. a high-tuned piccolo snare.

NOBLE
The Radio Rocker: Full-bodied, refined and punchy, for alternative anthems.

PRIME
The Mainstreamer: Superb and well balanced for sold-out stadiums and rock royalty.

Gentle:
Polishing and pleasant, use this for ballads or power pop.

Slam:
For that garage sound, too much compression. Pumping & cranked.

Bite:
Less bass, more lower mids, aggressive. Super fast punk anthem anyone?

Crush:
Distortion and saturation, think tape machine and valve distortion. Fast FOO’d, if you know what I mean.

Bounce:
More warmth, modern, Hip-hop-inspired, Rick Rubin might enjoy this one, if he’d ever touch a plug-in. Sound-designed by Richie Beretta in NYC.

Wide:
Stadium-Rock, big and expensive, more subtleties, less punch.

Make your drums stand out! Smack adds purpose-recorded and processed mic signals that focus attacks and transients while retaining the warm, organic qualities of the kit.

Crossfades between two sets of mics: basically from nice and clean to dirty and mean.

What makes BRUTE special? First and foremost it has been designed, recorded and processed to do one thing really well: Compete with layered walls of distorted guitars while maintaining character and detail. This was a tricky challenge… The solution was to record with three different sets of microphones that emphasize different aspects of the drum sound.

Smack: Turns up the clicky microphone to make the sound cut through the mix.
Grit: Blends between 2) and 3): Basically adjusting how clean or dirty your signal sounds.

Drumming in the name of Programming realistic drum tracks can be daunting. With BRUTE it’s fast and easy, so you can focus on your music

BRUTE features 5 Drum Kits, 6 mix presets, 31 Styles with 23 ready-made phrases each, for a total of 713 phrases.