Snorkel Audio Little is a new free drum machine plugin that runs on macOS, Windows, and iPadOS, providing the essentials for making beats.
With Battalion, Unfiltered Audio offers one of the most powerful drum machines ever developed as a plugin. Sometimes you don’t need the whole arsenal to make good beats. For that, the essentials are sufficient.
Snorkel Audio, a new developer, has released Little, a free drum machine plugin that offers this packaged in a very straightforward design.
Snorkel Audio Little
Little Drum Machine is a free plugin that runs on macOS, Windows, and iPadOS. Little can be found on the Snorkel Audio website that doesn’t smell of AI, or in the Apple App Store. It’s designed for the moments you just need drums, says the developer.
It offers eight drum channels powered by a sample engine. It ships with 32 samples across the eight drums. Nice; they come with four variants per drum you can swap per lane or even per step. Alternatively, you can load your own samples and build your own kits.
In a dedicated mixer, you get per-drum volume, pan, a three-band EQ, mute, and solo, plus master EQ and a one-knob glue compressor to make the kit sit together. So, everything you need to make great-sounding drum machine sounds.
A built-in sequencer provides the groove. Each channel has 16 steps, which is unfortunately somewhat limited. I would have preferred 64. You can adjust the velocity, set accents, and even ghost notes.
Drum Variations
For variety, it also comes with musical randomization and mutate. According to the developer, the randomize button is tuned to stay musical, meaning the kick acts like kicks and snares land where snares land.
Besides this, you have Mutate, which takes the beat you have and evolves it by placing it somewhere new on the grid. These two features allow you to easily create new patterns.
Further, Little Drum Machine comes with an arranger tab where you can chain and loop scenes into a full song. Oh yeah, every preset can hold up to 16 scenes.
As a lovely bonus, each drum can also send MIDI on its own channel and note. This allows you to use the plugin to sequence other drum synths or instruments. Little ships with 20 presets (techno, house, jazz…) to start from.
First Impression
A beautiful, simple drum machine with core features that you always need. I like the simplicity of the app’s design, which inspires me more than crowded ones. Plus, it’s also available for iPadOS with AUv3 plugin support.
Snorkel Audio Little is available now as a free download. It runs as a VST3 and AU plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. It is also available for free for iPadOS on the Apple App Store with AUv3 plugin support.
More information here: Snorkel Audio / App Store
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