Bloom Drum Breaks Review
- Sound
- Features
- Ease Of Use
Drum Breaks Made Easy
FYI: the review has been updated after the major 1.2 update.
We welcome the model that Excite Audio is using to familiarize us all with the ever-evolving art of chopping drum breaks.
PROS
- Fully featured drum break rompler ready for Drum and Bass, EDM, or even Jazz/Plunderphonics compositions
- Everything you need to get started right away making music that usually requires involved editing with smart playback algos & FX
- Can be MIDI-controlled by other plugins, offering greater sonic possibility
CONS
- None really
UPDATE: Excite Audio has just announced a major update for all their software instruments, allowing users to import their samples!
——————-
If you’re a crate digger looking for some percussive samples but don’t want to use a drum machine to arrange them, Bloom Drum Breaks is here. Designed by Excite Audio, this plugin is specifically attuned towards percussion – but not just any kind of percussion – drum breaks.
The Amen Break: A Brief History
You might be familiar with the Amen Break – but in case you’re not, here’s a history lesson. In 1969, a group called The Winstons released a song called “Amen, Brother”, which included a fast, simple shuffle/drum/roll. Despite The Winstons’ disbanding in 1970, this sample (a little over 7 seconds long) has had ripple effects that still impact the music industry.
The sample has since been sampled countless times and re-imagined by descendants in Hip Hop and Electronic music. Most notably, Drum and Bass as a genre would not exist without it. Of course, drum breaks and their usage are only limited by your imagination – not by genre.
Bloom Drum Breaks: Features and Functionality
Interface and Sample Banks
Bloom Drum Breaks by Excite Audio is Number 2 in a recent series that also includes Bloom Vocal Aether. It follows a similar concept as Vocal Aether, which involves the re-arranging of slices and samples via a shuffling algorithm. This is similar to a rompler or sampler, and grants the user a sample bank that can be triggered in chops by an accessible 2-octave keyboard.
User Interface and Features
Bloom boasts a simple face-value interface. From a bird’s eye, you have 2 panels – the main “Block” screen with visualizer and 4 macro FX controls (Digital, Lo-Fi, Slap Verb, & Phaser), and the Edit screen, which offers much deeper attenuation of the sample(s).
Accessing the Loop Menu (from the bottom of the screen), there are 112 loops built in to the full version across 8 banks of 14, offering you a nearly endless series of combinations of breaks. There are 250 presets, each of which is a unique mixture of phrase playback and fine-tuned settings to help get you going.
While there are definitely plenty of combinations one can come up with within this engine, it’s a shame the user is currently limited to the built-in samples. Perhaps in a future update, the developer will consider implementing custom user sample import.
Chopping and Rearranging Drum Breaks – Keyboard and Phrase Player
At the bottom of the plugin regardless of which panel you’re on, you have a standard 2-octave keyboard. The white keys play samples. The black keys work as FX on the left octave, and play back “Phrases” on the right (labelled ABCD & E and called “Modifiers”).
For those who have ever actually tried to chop a drum break and rearrange it into a shuffle, you know that this can be a time-consuming process. Bloom Drum Breaks provides controls that simplify this process and can be recorded easily in your DAW.
Under the Edit menu, the Sample Edit panel allows you to highlight a section of the waveform\drum loop for playback (for a chopping effect) and implement that chop into the Phrase Player. The numbers in Sample Edit correspond to the labelled sections in the Phrase Player.
In the Edit Panel, you have options for double or half-time playback for the sample, grid-snapping, and ADSR time controls for time-variant effects (for example, pitching a phrase up to a peak point). The Phrase Player also has a randomizer function, giving you even more unique rhythmic interactions. Each phrase can be up to 16 steps.
As an experiment, try opening one of the presets and clicking on one of the empty steps in the Edit menu and filling in a sample to hear the difference it makes as the Phrase is played back.
Hands-on Experience: MIDI Support and FX
Using my keyboard to trigger phrases didn’t take long to get ahold of – but MIDI support is super helpful. I tested it out with my Korg MIDI controller, and it was even easier, not having to worry about my keyboard accidentally triggering transport controls.
One of the more fun features of this app is triggering a Phrase while holding down an FX key. Reversal of an entire Phrase is a fun thing to actually “play” and not just “do” as a task in your DAW sometimes, and having instant access to pitch up and down FX at the touch of a key is fun for when you want to create breakdown sections that serve as a transition or precursor to a drop – which drum breaks tend to call for.
Noise Module and Effects
One of my favorite features of this plugin is the “noise” module in the bottom FX section in the Edit panel. You can choose from 15 different noise sources to mix into your drum lines (including crowd noise, a genre regular for Drum and Bass – but also some unique ones, like crumpling paper) with 3 different methods of mixing them in (Dynamic, Ducked, & Constant). The two other modules, Saturation and Dynamics, help to fill in further harmonic space subtly and effectively.
Versatility and Limitations
Bloom Drum Breaks is highly versatile and can fit into the entire range of BPMs – from a chill Trip Hop track at 100 to a speedy 175 for a Drum and Bass track. In fact, you even have options for Double and Half-Time playback of the samples so you don’t have to manually edit that in your DAW. For some, it may be considered a limitation that you can’t import your own samples (check out our XLN Audio XO review for that) – and indeed it is a different thing than a drum machine in that way.
Unlike the original Amen Break, you have quite a few arrangements of samples to work from here, and you don’t have to worry about copyright. Given that the breaks themselves can be drag/dropped into your keyboard triggers, they are quite modular with playback. That is what separates this plugin from a traditional drum machine.
Pricing and Availability
Bloom Drum Breaks is currently on sale for $39 (normally $59), with the Lite version going for $19. The two Bloom plugins can also be purchased in a bundle for $69. This sale expires March 31st.
If you take a look at Excite Audio’s official About page for Bloom Drum Breaks, there is a chart showing the differences between the Lite and Full versions.
Bloom Drum Breaks Review – Final Thoughts
We welcome the model that Excite Audio is using to familiarize us all with the ever-evolving art of chopping drum breaks. Bloom Drum Breaks is affordable, fun, and easy to use – it can be a great gateway to the drum breaks world. Not being able to add your own samples might be a significant limitation for some, but we’re excited to see what future updates have in store for Bloom Drum Breaks.
Written by: C_Quin
C_Quin is a producer, playlist curator, and 1/2 of 3rdPersonProductions – a music collective from WA, US. Please visit @3rdPersonProd on Instagram for more info!
