Nepheton

Synthesized drum sounds have been a staple in popular music for decades, but the trend wasn’t always like this. Two legendary drum machines from the 1980s can be considered responsible for opening the path that many musicians took at the time: the TR-808 and the TR-909, both released by the Roland Corporation. Ironically, these iconic instruments were commercial failures and received criticism for not sounding natural.

Both of them were extremely important to the evolution of electronic dance music, while the 808 also had a prominent role in the development of hip-hop. Naturally, many clones of said drum machines were released, both as physical and digital instruments. Today we’re going to take a look at an 808 emulation developed by D16 Group, and named Nepheton.

Those who have played with a Roland TR-808 or any of its clones before will Nepheton’s interface familiar. While this plugin has slightly more drums and slightly more parameters for each of them, those who are expecting the warm booming sound of the 808 won’t be disappointed.

You can play the drum machine as you would normally, preferably with the help of a MIDI-controller, or you can activate the internal sequencer and allow Nepheton to do the work for you. In this situation, playing keys will trigger presets and change banks. Even if you don’t find much use in the plugin’s presets, you can always create and save your own. And if these presets represent different phrases of your compositions, then being able to trigger them could be helpful during the recording process.

Since it’s modeled after an instrument from the 1980s, you can’t really expect Nepheton to have an insane amount of complex parameters to modulate your drums. But you can still make them fairly loud, and you can also select different outputs for each drum in order to edit them in your DAW. This virtual drum machine is ideal for those who enjoy old-school drum programming and analog beats.