Klevgrand Slammer

The prolific Swedish developers drop a crunchtastic drum plugin. Si Truss takes a beating

Regular readers will know we’re fans of Swedish developers Klevgrand. Their plugins tend to be relatively cheap, slick-looking and fairly unique in scope – a winning combination in our books – and their latest, Slammer, is no exception to the rule.

This is a 12-track samplepowered drum machine featuring 30 instrument types that collectively make use of more than 2,000 samples. What sets Slammer apart is its selection of sound sources; the instruments mix traditional acoustic drum sounds like bass drums, snares and cymbals with ‘junk’ drums including crowbars, shovels and pipes. There are little variations of each instrument too, so we get kicks hit with both beater and stick, a snare with a tray placed on it, a broken cymbal and a shovel hit with a variety of types of stick.

Each instrument can be tailored in its own edit window.

The controls here are fairly straightforward, but flexible enough to shape the drum sounds as needed. Each sample has controls for Pitch, Gain, Pan position and Decay and Transient dials for shaping. There’s a neat velocity adjustment system too, with controls to set Range and a Gain Curve – displayed in the UI, for some reason, on a drawing of a vintage TV – that makes it easy to adjust how each sound responds to incoming levels. Down the bottom, each sound also has low and high shelf EQ controls, plus sends for the master reverb and distortion busses.

It’s these effects busses that really act to tie the sound of Slammer together. The reverb is fairly straightforward, control-wise, with just decay and level dials, but it offers up a selection of six different algorithms that have a nicely broad range, going from tight room reverb right through to shimmery tops and thundering, OTT space. The distortion is a similar story: here we get controls for distortion amount, compression and overall buss level. There’s also a mode selector with eight different options that dictate how the distortion will affect the overall frequency spectrum and allow users to target it for very crisp high-end distortion or gritty, thumping kicks. The final element in the signal chain is a simple three-band EQ, which affects the master and distortion busses but not the reverb.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Slammer does anything we haven’t seen before – ‘junk’ drums aren’t exactly a new thing, and the range of parameters and effects is fairly standard fare. The implementation is very nicely done though. The UI has a lovely hand drawn vibe, including stylish sketches of each instrument type, those aforementioned TVs and master output monitoring designed to look like a robotic face.

More significantly, the sampled instruments themselves sound excellent right out the box, and the simple setup provides instant gratification. There’s nothing in the way of in-plugin sequencing here, but it’s simple to assign each instrument a MIDI note and Slammer is an absolute joy to play hooked up to a trigger pad or MIDI controller.

What sets Slammer apart is its selection of sound sources

FM VERDICT 7.8

A simple plugin with stellar sound, capable of instant beat gratification at a reasonable price