A drum machine plugin, designed and engineered solo

Challenge

Every producer knows the blank-session problem: the groove in your head dies somewhere between an empty DAW project and a grid of gray squares. Beat tools tend to fail in one of two directions, sounding robotic or burying the musician in menus. I wanted a drum machine that puts a club-ready groove under your hands in seconds and feels like an instrument, not a spreadsheet.

Approach

I built Drummer-1 end to end as sole developer: a VST3/AU pattern sequencer for macOS that generates genre-true beats (Hip Hop, Trap, UK Garage, Techno) and exports them as audio or MIDI into any DAW. The musicality lives in the details, per-hit dynamics, groove and swing, micro-timing, and a Euclidean pattern builder, so patterns breathe like a drummer instead of ticking like a clock. The brand, the interface, the engineering, the site at drummer-1.com, and the distribution pipeline are all one hand.

Impact

Drummer-1 shipped and is in producers' hands, generating thousands of dollars in sales, with genre packs expanding since launch. In February 2026, AMAZONA, one of Germany's leading music technology publications, featured the plugin, covering its genre packs, pattern editing, and DAW integration. It is also where the threads of this site meet: a musician's ear, a designer's interface, and an engineer's shipping code in a single artifact.

VST3 / AU Audio Engineering Product Design Brand

Next project

Project 28 Game Design, Art Direction, Engineering

Drummer-1 sequencer playing the Clean preset: seven tracks, hits filled to their velocity, the playhead on beat 5 and the firing samples lit

Drummer-1 pack browser: Bodega, Electro, Bando Bands and UK Rave packs beside a preset list with pattern previews

Pattern builder: 13 hits spread over 64 steps, as a ring and as four rows of steps

Dynamics: hi-hat velocities accented on the beat inside a 35 to 100 percent range

Groove: off-beats pushed 20 milliseconds late by a hard swing at 58 percent

Micro-timing: the hi-hat landing 2 milliseconds after the kick