Contemporary hard-and-heavy music genres driven by a very specific drumming style: loud, wild, edgy and cutting through the mix. Both drum sounds and playing are rooted in aesthetics invented about two decades ago. Virtual Drummer BRUTE features the essential sounds and styles from Grunge to NuMetal. In a nutshell: BRUTE is the Virtual Drummer for you, if HEAVY 2 is too Metal-ish and SOLID 2 not rocking hard enough.

In the early 1990s, a guitar-heavy new musical category set out to conquer the hearts and ears of the audience. A new generation of artists would unleash distorted guitars, angry drums, and bucketloads of attitude onto an audience that was suddenly keen to rock out again. Influenced by classic rock of the 1960s and ’70s, and in opposition to the synthetic aesthetics of the prior decade, bands like Rage Against The Machine, Nirvana, Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains popularized the next incarnation of Rock music. Its playbook is still today the go-to for guitar-heavy hard rocking styles.

 Punchy, crisp character
What makes BRUTE special? First and foremost it has been designed, recorded and processed to do one thing really well: Compete with layered walls of distorted guitars while maintaining character and detail. This was a tricky challenge… The solution was to record with three different sets of microphones that emphasize different aspects of the drum sound.

 Each of the three microphone sets has a specific sonic purpose:

• Click/Smack: The vintage Sennheiser MD21 from the 1960s emphasizes the attack transients. The source signal was processed with a Manley Voxbox.
• Grit/Dirt: Vintage tube and ribbon overhead mics. This is where the character is captured. All the organic noise and resonances that give a warm, coarse and natural quality.
• Clean/Nice: Modern high-spec Schoeps microphones that capture the sound ’as is’. With as little colorization and distortion as possible. For an expensive and glossy character.

 Kit Rock
The five drum kits in BRUTE have been composed with specific styles in mind. Listen to these different drum kits starting from dry to wet, blending mixing presets and the “Smack” control into the sound of each kit.

 Sound City
If you’d like to dive deeper into the history of this sound, we recommend Dave Grohl’s (Foo Fighters) documentary ’Sound City’ about the iconic studio.

 Features at a Glance
BRUTE features 5 Drum Kits, 6 mix presets, 31 Styles with 23 ready-made phrases each, for a total of 713 phrases.