Zachary Rowden Koom is a free FM kick drum Synthesizer plugin for iPadOS and macOS with a fully tweakable engine.
There are many high-quality AUv3 plugins from various developers available on the Apple App Store, including well-known ones that have ported their desktop plugins, such as Eventide and FabFilter.
Due to the annual fee that developers must pay to Apple, the number of free plugins is somewhat limited. The Audiokit Synth One J6 release was already a big deal for fans of free apps. Great news: Zachary Rowden has released Koom, a new free synthesizer for iPadOS.
Zachary Rowden Koom
Koom is a new free kick drum Synthesizer plugin for iPadOS and macOS. According to Zachary Rowden, Koom relies on a custom Faust backend that is wrapped in a JUCE-based interface.
The synth is designed to create deep, distorted, and percussive bass tones. Its core consists of five distinct sound blocks: amplitude, analog-style distortion, filter, FM oscillator, and pitch.
When it comes to the respective parameters, it is noticeable that these sometimes have very unusual names, like awavness in the amp section.
It starts with the amp section, with four distinct parameters: awavness, gain, here-ness, and inset. Then, you can tweak the distortion section, adding crunch and dirt to your sounds. There are four parameters available: arched, crunch, lean, and sustain.
One step further, you can filter the sound using cutoff, fade in, resonance, smudge, and smudge out parameters. Exactly, somewhat unusual parameters for a filter.
In the second part of the Koom engine, you have the FM synthesis with various controls: arc, tade, frequency, index, and onset. Of course, you can also tune your sounds. The pitch section gives you multiple ways to modify the tuning of your sounds: curve, tade, trea, intensity, and stretchness.
The sounds you create with the Zachary Rowden Koom drum synth can be played instantly with a trigger button or with MIDI. There’s also a simple preset browser where you can save your sounds. However, the app doesn’t come with any presets.
Thumbs up for the developer, not forgetting the AUv3 plugin support. Another plus point: you can also use the app as an AUv3 plugin on macOS Apple Silicon systems.
First Impression
I immediately downloaded the app and gave it a try. Koom sounds very solid and offers a lot of tweakability. The only downside for me is the often somewhat strange names for the parameters. I hope the developer can make them more classic, but otherwise, it’s a great release.
Zachary Rowden Koom is available now as a free download from the Apple App Store. It runs as a standalone app and AUv3 plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon only) and iPadOS.
More information here: App Store
a few preset would be nice, hitting the random button yield more of a whooppee cushion sound , hardly thunderous bass