EastWest DrumX review: the only drum machine plugin you need?

$299 / $20 per month ComposerCloud+ subscription, soundsonline.com

DrumX sees EastWest Sounds team up with musician and producer Jimmy Jam, whose long list of credits include Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men, Mary J Blige, Mariah Carey, and The Human League, with 42 chart-topping hits. This drum machine instrument combines the sounds of 10 iconic machines with custom Jimmy Jam samples and grooves, giving you exclusive access to the sound of countless pop, R&B and electro funk hits. It’s a punchy, powerful and flexible collection, only let down by a sometimes cumbersome interface.

DrumX loads into EastWest’s Opus sample player instrument, which can run standalone or inside your DAW. It includes a massive 31GB of samples, covering TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, LinnDrum, LM-1, DR-55, DR-110, DMX, DrumTraks, and SP-12 drum machines. These have been deeply sampled with up to four-times round-robin, a real room ambience, and five levels of Studer tape saturation. These options bring life and variation to the sounds, avoiding the rigid machine-gun-like effect you get doing snare rolls with more static samples.

Each kit loads samples into a four-by-four pad grid, and you can edit the sounds individually with a fairly standard selection of controls alongside a few instrument-specific ones such as the 808 Kick Tone and Decay dials. There’s no deep editing or modulation, but it’s enough to shape each sound to fit your track. You can also affect the whole kit with transient shaping, drive, crush and compressor macros at the top of the interface, which is a fun and quick way to beef up the sound. In terms of sequencing, you can input 64 steps and accents along the bottom, or alternatively click the Grid button to switch the pads into a larger grid sequencer for the full kit. Everything is fairly immediate and available from a single screen, which makes programming basic beats fast.

As mentioned, you get 10 iconic drum machines saved as individual kits, plus a bunch of extra Jimmy Jam custom sounds. These add further original character to the mix and include reverse sounds, percussion, and powerful gated hits. You can mix and match drum machine elements using the All Kits patch, or mix up the Jimmy Jam samples using the All Kits Custom patch. Frustratingly though, you can’t blend these samples alongside the drum machines in the same interface.

Elsewhere, you get patches that load a single instrument onto a single pad for the purpose of layering within Opus. There’s also all the kicks, for example, spread across several pads, or a single sound pitched chromatically across the 16 pads. It’s a little confusing at first, and it would be more fluid if access to these options could somehow be incorporated into a single instance, but it’s possible to set up various different layouts as long as you’re willing to layer separate instances within Opus.

If you don’t already have a collection of solid, classic drum machine samples, then DrumX could be an excellent choice, as it covers all the main bases in great depth with several variations. I test the 808, 909 and several other kits alongside a few alternative sample instruments and although they lack a little top-end and sound subtly saturated, they make up for it with an incredible amount of punch.

The obvious star of the show here is the selection of Jimmy Jam grooves, which include 214 beats paired with custom-curated kits. You can mix and match grooves with any kit using the Groove Browser, which also includes a pattern preview button and the ability to drag and drop the MIDI straight into your DAW. Stylistically, they range from big, 80s-style R&B power grooves with gated snares, reverse sounds and fills, to more modern-sounding and distorted electro beats. Not all of them are winners, as some rely a bit too much on gritty bitcrush effects, but there’s plenty here to showcase why Jimmy has so many platinum records under his belt. There’s an effective balance of simplicity, originality and varied sound selection. If you’re particularly looking to evoke that late 80s, early 90s sound, then this will get you there straight away. The only thing to look out for though is a massive variation in preset kit volumes, with some peaking at +15 dB.

In terms of more modern sounds, DrumX is slightly more limited on the surface as it’s drawing on old hardware. However, the Opus instrument has an incredibly comprehensive Mix tab where you can build individual processing chains for each sound, and choose from a large range of highly editable effects processors and convolution reverbs. These even include officially-licensed SSL Channel Strip, Bus Compressor and Transient Shaper effects. With a little tweaking, you can give these classic drum machines a unique and characterful flavour, and you can also route individual sounds to separate outputs if you want to process them using other plugins.

Although it’s sonically strong, the lack of any modulation, or depth in the sequencer noticeably limits how detailed and alive you can make your beats sound. There’s not even a way to change the velocity of the hits outside of the simple accent buttons, although if you want to get more in-depth then you have the option of simply drum programming from within your DAW. Thankfully, there’s a flexible macro and automation system that offers some unique hands-on control.

These drawbacks aside, DrumX is a great sounding drum machine, with buckets of punch coming from the samples, and additional weight and power available through the extensive processing options.

At $299, it’s expensive. As an alternative, Wave Alchemy’s Revolution is £99 and also features an array of deeply sampled classic drum machines. However, it lacks Jimmy Jam’s excellent custom samples and broad selection of production-ready grooves. If these have value for the type of music that you’re making, then DrumX is well worth a look.

Key features

• 10 iconic drum machines: TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, LinnDrum, LM-1, DR-55, DR-110, DMX, DrumTraks, and SP-12
• 408 instruments (exclusive Jimmy Jam Kits, DX Kits, DX Layers, DX Stacks, DX Pitched and DX All Kits)
• Up to 4x round-robin sampling
• 214 Jimmy Jam grooves (dance industrial, R&B, funk, pop, hip-hop and ballad genres)
• 64 step sequencer with global swing, per step accent & randomise function
• 16 pads/sounds per kit, with the ability to stack multiple kits
• Tape Saturation knob with 6 options
• Machine specific parameter controls for deeply sampled sounds
• Full mixer with extensive per channel processing and effects options
• Multi-out routing, drag and drop MIDI grooves & MIDI learn