Drums
The art and science of sound
Aphelion is a research-driven audio company exploring the outer reaches of what is practically possible in sound. We build instruments and effects by starting from first principles, whether that means modeling the physics of a room, the behavior of an analog circuit, or rethinking the assumptions behind synthesis, sequencing, and signal processing altogether. Our work sits somewhere between engineering, acoustics, music technology, and experimental design: rigorous enough to measure, strange enough to discover something new, and always built in service of music. We are less interested in reproducing the conventions of audio software than in finding out what becomes possible when those conventions are treated as questions instead of rules.
1 of 4 is free - no account, nothing to unlock.
The flagship
ANLI ENABLEDDropforge
Component-Modeled Drum Computer · Also a Synth and a Sampler
Finally, drums that keep up with your ideas.
Eight component-modeled drum instruments, three synthesis cores, sampling, per-event effects, parameter locks, and enough sequencing to write the whole song.
VST®3 instrument · Windows 64-bit · macOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
Also up front
NETLISTMandible
Netlist Drum Computer
1024 pages of bad intentions. Bruxer's bigger nastier brother.
- Write a whole song of drums that grind their teeth
- Put a reverb on one snare and leave the next one dry
- Let an LFO chew on any knob of any drum
- Hit the kick hard and hear the whole kit sag
- Drop a groove from the crate and make it bite
- Play it live, then bounce the real thing
VST®3 instrument · Windows 64-bit · macOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
Also up front
ANLI ENABLEDTurbofan
Eight-Bay Sampler · Every Bay a Song
Eight songs at once, and every hit its own.
- Eight bays of twelve samples, and every bay a song of up to 1,024 one-bar pages
- Every note its own chance, ratchet, pan and stretch
- Eight effect lanes, note by note: crush, reduce, delay, reverb, pitch, stretch, reverse and pan
- TIME or GRANULAR pitch, and stretching that keeps a sound's own pitch
- WAVE EDIT quantizes a sound's hits to the song, and ADVANCED PITCH shifts it bucket by bucket
- No activation, no license server, no phone-home
VST®3 instrument · Windows 64-bit · macOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
Free
NETLISTBruxer
Netlist Drum Machine · Free Plugin
WE MUST HAVE GONE INSANE!!
- Free, and the plugin never asks who you are
- Hit harder and hear every drum grind its teeth
- Lean on the kick and feel the whole kit sag
- Lock a different crunch onto every clap in the bar
- Pull a groove from Thump and make it bite
- Play it live, then bounce the real thing
VST®3 instrument · Windows 64-bit · macOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
Circuits, not recordings
The drum machines people still reach for were never playing back recordings. A voice was a resonator pinged by a trigger pulse, a clap's repeats were dealt by an oscillator retriggering a capacitor, and resistors and capacitors decided every rate. The drums here that are component-modeled are built from those parts and solve them every sample. It describes how a particular instrument is built, so it is a claim each one makes for itself rather than one the shelf makes for all of them.
The same component library builds the synths and the effects.
VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.