Review: UJAM Instruments Virtual Drummer 2

Price £109
Contact UJAM | Plugin Boutique

The original UJAM Virtual Drummer was released a couple of years back, designed to be a straightforward way to create realistic drumming styles played by virtual drummers in your DAW. You get patterns, fills, different kits and individual hits and a certain amount of control over your sounds. This bundle comes to us via Plugin Boutique, with a price tag that saves you over £85 when compared to buying three individual virtual drummers – so, on the face of it, it makes a lot of sense if you need some realistic beats in your music.

Three virtual-drummer packs are included: Heavy 2 features a “hard-hitting rock drummer, permanently set to Beast mode”; Solid 2 is more about fine session drumming; and finally, Phat 2 is for funky, street beats. You simply register at the UJAM site and download each pack (around 1.5GB each).

Virtual Drummer really is all about ease of use across all three titles, so you get obvious key mapping shown for all the elements, plus easy access to usually five different drum kits per pack, with descriptive names such as Soft, Deep, Natural, Tight or Hard, so you know pretty much what you’re going to get. There’s a section allowing you to tweak individual kit sounds with options like Decay, Tune and Reverb.

There are further screen sections to adjust the room sound and an overall Master section. Further Mix Presets allow you to tweak the compression, EQ and more of the overall sound which gives you an even greater level of sonic flexibility.

The three packs really do offer a good range of styles and sounds across the board and owning the bundle gives you a foot in many different genres. Solid 2 is a bread-and-butter range that is suitable for mainstream country, rock and pop, while Heavy is as hard-hitting as you might imagine. Phat offers a much more laid-back vibe and perhaps the most interest.

With 200 presets for each drummer, 60 musical styles and over 1,300 patterns each,
it’s ridiculously easy to create great drumming over a wide variety of genres and then tweak the feel afterwards. You don’t get precision editing, but this is all about creating non-machine beats quickly and is highly recommended.

Key features

● Virtual-drumming software bundle of three titles
● AAX, AU, and VST
● Includes Phat 2, Heavy 2 and Solid 2 ’drummers’
● Build your own drum kits with kit-editing options
● New Master Section with saturation and maximiser
● Each of the three drummer packs has 200 presets, 60 musical styles with 1,380 different patterns