Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs brings the sound and feel of the cult 1980s Sequential Circuits DrumTraks drum machine to your DAW for FREE.
Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs: Free Sequential Circuits DrumTraks Emulation
God bless Björn Arlt. No, seriously. The man behind software developer Full Bucket Music has released so many incredible synthesizer and drum machine emulations over the years, it’s not even funny. He’s done most of the Korg classic back catalog and has now started working on the glory years of Sequential Circuits. And best of all, they’re all FREE.
Following on the Six-Traq, which saw Sequential’s pioneering multi-timbral analog poly get the software treatment, he’s now turned his considerable talents towards a recreation of the DrumTraks, SCI’s first drum machine and competitor to the Oberheim DMX and Linn Electronics LinnDrum.
Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs: Emulating a Classic
Sequential Circuits (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, by the way) released the Model 400 DrumTraks in 1984. Sample-based, it offered an affordable alternative to the big players while still providing professional features. (Ultravox percussionist Warren Cann loved it in his review for Electronics & Music Maker in 1984.) To get the price point down, SCI understandably had to cut some corners, and it’s these limitations that give it its quirky character.
Arlt has embraced these quirks in his recreation, saying, “It is a faithful recreation of the original hardware with all its limitations and only a few extensions. Don’t be afraid of time travel – this is the way drum computers were handled more than 40 years ago!”
Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs: What to Expect
Rather than reprogram the DrumTraks operating system, Arlt decided to simulate the original’s Z80 chip system within the final plugin. (SCI famously also used a Z80 to handle the groundbreaking patch memory in its Prophet-5.) This means that the DrumTraqs software has all the weirdness of the DrumTraks hardware – so much so that the manual for DrumTraqs is largely just the original manual with new pictures!
In terms of specs, DrumTraqs offers six-voice polyphony with 13 drum sounds spread across six channels. You get the original DrumTrak sounds plus some additional ones that replicate the experience of changing out the internal sound chips known as EPROMs. DrumTraqs offers basic sample tuning and expands the outputs to stereo from the original mono.
Additionally, Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs offers an internal sequencer with pattern and song modes or you can trigger sounds via MIDI – even chromatically. You can import and export patterns as MIDI files or SysEx.
Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs: It’s Free, Just Download It
I’ve never played with an original hardware DrumTraks so I can’t say how close the sound is but it sounds good to my ears. And of course, I appreciate the hard work Björn Arlt has put into it.
Full Bucket Music DrumTraqs is free and available now from the Full Bucket Music site (link below) in macOS and Windows in VST, VST3, AU, CLAP, and AAX formats.
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