Softube Heartbeat ($169) is a modern plugin take on classic drum machines of the 70s and 80s. It’s a 32-bit and 64-bit compatible VST/AU/AAX plugin for PC and Mac based plugin hosts.

Heartbeat is not an emulation of any specific vintage drum machine, but rather an amalgamation of emulations inspired by various machines. There are two kicks, two snares, a closed/open hi-hat, two percussion channels, and one cymbal for a total of eight elements.

Drums

The two kicks are both mighty and fat, in a vintage way. One is similar to the Roland TR-909 drum machine and the other to the TR-808. Both can do short thumpy kicks as well as longer ones, and the low end can get really powerful with the right settings. Having both a regular kick and an 808 seems like it would be useful for making modern trap where the 808 is used as a bass. However, because the 808-style kick and its controls are quite vintage, it’s not really easy to play a bassline that hits specific notes, and thus not possible to do modern tricks like bending the pitch up by an octave during the decay phase of the 808 kick. So, if you want to do something like that, you’ll have to make an 808 sound tuned to a note, export it to a WAV file and sequence the 808 part in a sampler. An easier way to use both kicks at once, though, is to make one extremely short kick and have it add a noisy attack transient to the other kick.

The snares also come in a pair. One of the two available snares also does rimshots, whereas the other one also does claps. Both are hybrids of sample playback and synthesis (this is not “bad” by any means – for example, the classic Linn drum machines used samples as well) with blend controls for both the sample and synth parts, which means that each snare sound is a mix of four components. This makes them quite flexible. Whereas the kicks are basically 909 and 808 flavored, the snares can sound like a wider variety of classic Roland and non-Roland drum machines. The pure synth waveforms can even sound like those zippy old snares created on old-school monosynths.

The hi-hat module also features both samples and synthesis. One hi-hat channel does both closed and open hi-hat sounds which mute each other automatically, so that you can’t hit an open hi-hat and a closed one at the same time. There are no intermediate degrees of hi-hat openness (as on an acoustic drum kit). Aside from that, though, the hi-hat is quite flexible and can do anything from very short, percussive clicks to more acoustic sounding hi-hats.

The two percussion elements are identical to each other and do not use any samples. Instead, each percussion module has five synthesis modes ranging from a single triangle wave to fixed-ratio frequency modulation with added noise. These can do anything from 70s synth toms to a variety of Latin percussion and even a nice synthetic church bell.

The cymbal is probably my least favorite, because it definitely sounds realistically vintage. Cymbals have always been very tough to synthesize and vintage drum machine cymbals were very limited – even the TR-909 included a very small sample data table in its cymbal circuit. So, I’m not personally a big fan of vintage drum machine cymbals, but if you want that raw and simple nostalgic sound, Heartbeat does deliver, and the sound can vary in flavor from a crash to a ride cymbal.

All the sounds are essentially vintage in tone and character, so don’t expect to instantly make Pryda snares. There aren’t a whole lot of control parameters to play with, and what’s on offer tends to stick (for the most part) to what would have been possible with hardware drum machines back in the 80s. On the other hand, the kicks can get more modern and harmonically rich, and it’s certainly possible to generate something like a contemporary big room kick or a huge saturated 808. Layering and processing can also be used to make more modern drum sounds – extra instances of Heartbeat panned left and right with different settings are very useful for making more complex drum sounds, such as modern layered snares.

Controls

The sounds aren’t drastically more tweakable than an analog drum machine would be – the pitch control on the 808-style kick goes up and down by approximately a minor third, for example. There aren’t a ton of knobs for every drum element, with the number of sound generation controls (before the sounds hit the mixer) ranging from three to seven. So, Heartbeat keeps it both realistic and simple, and if extreme tweakability is what you want, you’ll need to seek it elsewhere. I don’t mind the simplicity, but as the kicks are my favorite elements, I hope that Softube might someday make a kick-only synth with expanded control parameters, something like a software version of the JoMox MBase.

Another interesting aspect of simplicity are the one-knob EQs. Each element’s mixer channel has a single EQ knob which affects frequencies specifically selected and tuned for that element. This is very nice, easy to use, and the chosen frequencies really do seem musical, although you’ll have to use an EQ effect in your DAW if you want to tweak other frequencies in a sound.

The biggest difference from classic hardware drum machines is that there is no typical sequencer – there’s no need for one in a plugin, since it’s more convenient to program the parts using the DAW’s sequencer. However, the instrument does have a very atypical sequencer called the Auto Layer Machine, which can be used for multilayered hits, flams or fills. To make things more interesting, it also includes randomization which ranges from subtle (adding some extra hits) to complete chaos. Very interesting, assuming you don’t need to have control over every hit and don’t mind some unpredictability. This can be great for adding fills to a live performance, and can also be used to create an unpredictably organic take on trendy hi-hat trap rolls.

The drums are mapped to MIDI notes and the default mapping hearkens back to early machines before General MIDI mappings. If you want to change the mapping to General MIDI or something else, notes can be either selected or input via MIDI learn. That should be especially useful for electronic kit drummers – click Learn for an element, then hit the controller piece you want to map it to.

The built-in effects include a reverb, a compressor and filtered echo, based on Softube’s other products. These are, much like the synthesis modules, high quality emulations of hardware gear. The compression can be set to affect all the drums modules, or all the drums except the kick (useful for ducking), and the reverb and echo have send knobs in each element’s mixer channel. For further processing, Heartbeat can either send everything to one mixer channel in the DAW, or send each element to a separate channel and the send effects to a ninth channel. The mixer also includes auto panning for each element and a master section which can be used to add saturation, EQ, and control stereo width while converting the low frequencies to mono. In other words, all the typical effects you might want to use on a drum machine are already built in.

Less typical are the master time gate and velocity sensitivity controls. Note velocity can affect not only volume, but also pitch, attack and decay. Maximizing the amount of velocity effect on pitch allows the percussion and kicks to play simple melodies or emulate a kit with lots of toms or woodblocks of different sizes. For something more subtle, using velocity to simultaneously control volume, add attack, extend decays significantly and raise pitch very slightly makes the sounds feel more responsive and organic when using any velocity-sensitive controller. Of course, it still sounds like a drum machine, and nothing like realistic acoustic drums, but in a weird way this machine feels more responsive than even very good acoustic drum samples – like a sampled drum kit with 127 perfect velocity layers. This should be especially appreciated by electronic kit drummers, although I suspect most of them would like to have intermediate degrees of hi-hat openness before they could really be happy with the expressiveness of the instrument.

The time gate knob is another unusual feature. It shortens all sounds, however everything still sounds recognizable even at extreme settings. This is great for making things sound really stiff and electronic, and having it gradually open up during a verse is one of the most fun things I’ve done with Heartbeat. It will not make things so short that they sound like glitchy percussion sounds more than drums. If you want to do that, though, extremely short decay settings on the individual drum elements will do the trick.

Like many good emulations of analog circuits, Heartbeat is fairly CPU hungry. On a Windows PC with an i7 processor, a reasonably complex pattern uses around 20% of available CPU resources. If you want to use multiple instances (for layering, low/mid/high toms on separate MIDI notes, full Latin percussion etc.), that adds up, although I was able to run four instances at once, adding up to an elaborate tribal percussion pattern with no stability issues and the CPU hovering around 65%. So, when using several instances in more complex projects with a lot of other plugins, rendering the drum tracks would probably become necessary.

Summary

Heartbeat is like a “best of” mix of several vintage drum machines. It has some rather innovative modern features added, but still preserves a consistently old-school sound. Heartbeat generally favors ease of use and simplicity over complete control and thorough tweakability. It hasn’t yet caused me to delete all samples of vintage drum machines from my hard drive, but compared to them it’s a lot more flexible, organic and alive.

More info: Heartbeat ($169)