Ujam Drums

[Zee Petty]

Each individual Virtual Drummer embodies a unique custom playing style sound and personality. HOT provides real drum performances with punchy drum machine-like processing, BRUTE is a modern rock, grunge, punk, and cross-over style drummer, DEEP is made for contemporary drums with a 60s & 70s vibe, SOLID is your all-around reliable session pro suitable for most popular styles, HEAVY delivers hard and straight rock beats while PHAT gives you urban and funky grooves.

All Virtual Drummers come with five extensively sampled drum kits, ready-made smart-mix presets, and a wide range of styles and performances that can be tweaked to perfectly match your desired feel and groove.

PreSonus Studio One users will now find style names and drum-elements printed on the keys of their piano roll. This makes finding the right styles and drums for your track a walk in the park.

Another cool feature to speed up your production: the scale range of styles and instruments are highlighted on the left side of your piano roll.

Enter your email to download Dope for free. No account or credit card needed, Dope will always be free.Get the free trial and use Dope for 30 days without limitations! Please enter your email address below to download.

The plugin has 6 mix presets, 5 drum kits and 30 different styles, this gives you a whole host of sounds and creative options when creating your songs. The mixer allows you to fine-tune your kits and control the individual microphones on each part of the kit. As well as add in more or less room and overhead. Pair this with the ability to change the tuning and decay of Individual drums, you have a host of sounds to choose from.

Looking at the layout and UI you can see you have two main options. On the left, you have the option to select between 5 drum kits, and on the right, you have the option to select between 6 Mix Presets. From here you can then go into the mixer and adjust the parameters as required for your song.

The Plugin give you the option to either program your drums using Midi (Drawing it in or using a MIDI controller), or you can use the pre-programmed drum loops. UJam Hot, allows you to hold a key down to play a drum pattern then press another key (Say for a drum fill) and the plugin will sync it up to tempo. A great feature allowing you to create music very quickly, but also gives you the freedom to input your MIDI patterns.

As with every UJam plugin I have used, installation and registration were a breeze and so simple! Just sign into the plugin with your account and if you have purchased the plugin it will pick it up, if not you will have the option for a free trial. The trail is an all-access trail for 30 days! Meaning you can sample the full plugin without any restrictions. Allowing you to get a good experience of it before deciding to purchase it or not.

The drum sounds of this plugin are amazing! Not just how they sound but how many there are! As with the Vice review (Read Review here), all the presets are useable and with a little messing around and adjusting you can get your sound without too much work. This leads me nicely to my next point, the UI and Interface. As with every UJam plugin I have used, their UI is second to none! Easy to use, clear to read and a joy to mess around with, however, also very easy to get good sounds and understand what does what!

The juice control is so good for bringing a new sound to your song. Creating a natural, live drum sound and then bringing up the juice allows you to bring in a more Drum machine sound and blend the two. Meaning you can create a very unique and punch drum sound.

That is our look at and review of the new UJam Hot drum plugin! Once again, thanks to UJam for sending me a copy of this plugin. I was using the demo for a while before I reach out to them asking about a review. I like it and will be using it when I need a more Pop or indie kind of drum feel. For the money I think it has some great features, easy to use but most importantly, contains some very useable sounds!

If you do want to give this plugin a go you can get a free trial of it or you can purchase it using the link below. The link is an affiliate link so we get a little kickback when you purchase! Helps support the site! You can also find them on Instagram along with our Instagram link as well. If you can think of any plugins you want us to check out then please let us know over on our Instagram.

Sound On Sound's Verdict: UJAM are perhaps targeting some specific types of music producer with Solid, Phat and Heavy. They may not be for everyone, but UJAM have hit their 'keep it simple' design approach to drum track production right on the head.

With a team including some of the original designers of Steinberg's Virtual Guitarist, over the last few years, UJAM have been bringing that concept up to date in the form of virtual guitarists, bassists and drummers. The latest releases bring significant updates to the three virtual drummers within their software-based session musician catalogue; Solid, Phat and Heavy. As the titles suggest, each specialises in a somewhat different range of musical styles, but they are built around the same front-end and underlying engine. So, if you are auditioning for a (virtual) session drummer, do UJAM have a suitable candidate?

While Steinberg's own Groove Agent has subsequently gone in a very different direction, in Solid, Phat and Heavy, UJAM are essentially reviving and updating the original GA concept, while also adding new features. That original concept was based around three key features; a solid set of sample-based drum sounds, a collection of style-based preset patterns that could easily be triggered to create a full drum performance, and a UI that emphasised efficient workflow rather than more forensic editing of the drum sounds and performances. UJAM have retained those design intentions here.

In terms of the first of these three elements, Solid, Phat and Heavy each have their own collection of five sample-based drum kits. Within a specific kit, you also get the option to swap between multiple snares, kicks, etc, allowing you to customise your drum selection. The second major element of each package is a sizeable collection of style-based pattern presets. Each of these presets contains a series of 23 related drum patterns, providing intros, patterns for verse or chorus sections, fills, breakdowns, endings, a few specials (extra groove variations) and a 'stop'.

Opening the Micro Timing panel allows you to switch between normal, half-speed and double-speed tempo, adjust the push/pull feel, apply some swing and adjust the tightness (or otherwise) of the playing. This is all pretty standard stuff for a virtual drummer instrument but does, of course, both increase your performance options and allow you to dial in just how 'human' you want your virtual drummer to sound.

In terms of user adjustments, once a kit is loaded, at a macro level, you also get six Mix Presets, each of which has its own sonic character. For example, in Solid, these are Smooth, Edge, Retro, Big, Power and Crush. Around the central logo, you also get the Amount and Slam controls. The former allows you to blend in just how much the Mix Preset settings alter the sound of the underlying kit, while Slam applies some overall compression. Things can get pretty squashed at extreme settings (if you like that kind of thing) but it's very usable at lower values.

The update to v2 provides some very useful further mix options, and I'll come back to these in a moment, but the overall control set remains compact and well-focused. If you just want to get a solid drum part together with a minimum of fuss, the workflow of Solid, Phat and Heavy will have some obvious appeal.

So, what's new in v2? Well, perhaps the first thing to note for existing owners is that the new versions are fully backwards compatible with the originals; projects created with the originals should therefore work fine with these v2 updates. There are, however, four significant new features that will appeal to both first-time purchasers and updaters.

The Master section provides a master output level control, a drop-down Mix Preset menu (offering a small selection of different reverb styles), and a Reverb level knob. The Maximize knob provides another dollop of dynamics control, while the Saturate control does exactly what you would expect and actually sounds rather good.

The third new feature is provided by the Individual button. You can activate this for each channel (including the overhead/room channels) and, providing you also activate the appropriate extra outputs within your DAW host, you can then route individual drums to either the master stereo out or to their own stereo output. These individual channels bypass the Master section, but it does allow you to apply the full arsenal of your DAW's processing options to your drum mix should you so wish.

Fourth, and also very welcome given my comment above about the importance of the pattern collection in any virtual drummer, all three titles now support MIDI pattern drag and drop to your DAW. You can, therefore, drag any of the patterns available in Solid, Phat or Heavy to a MIDI track and edit them as with any other MIDI clip. You can then replay that MIDI either with any suitable sample-based drum instrument, including any of the other UJAM drummers.

As a starting point for solid, studio-friendly drum sounds, Solid would be the obvious choice. In fact, given the five distinct kits, and the six Mix Preset starting points, sonically, Solid can easily offer you something for singer-songwriter, straight-ahead pop, funk, R&B, blues, rock and, with a suitable bit of added grit, into heavy rock. The pattern styles span various flavours of ballads, pop, reggae, funk, soul, rock with the occasional less mainstream options (for example, Soca, Train Shuffle or Country Waltz 3/4) also included.

There are no prizes for guessing that Heavy has a distinctly 'rawk' flavour to both its sounds and pattern styles. I'm perhaps less convinced of it as a source for that super-tight, modern metal or progressive rock sound straight out the box, although you can get in the ballpark by making use of the new mixing/sound-tweaking features described above. In terms of style patterns, Heavy covers various types of rock including classic, blues, indie, grunge, stoner and garage.

c80f0f1006