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EmoCore Drummer

A drum plugin for emo, midwest emo, post-hardcore and metalcore, built from real acoustic recordings.

A VST3 drum plugin I built for producing my own songs in FL Studio. It’s for my own use, so there’s no download or anything, but you can hear some of the groove and drum samples below.

The sound

  • Two kits of real multi-mic recordings: a natural kit for emo and midwest emo, and a heavy kit with double kick and two chinas for metalcore.
  • Velocity is mapped onto each drum’s recorded loudness range. Each hit plays one of the three nearest recordings at random, never the same one twice in a row, so ghost notes and full hits both sound like a drummer.
  • Double-kick hits alternate between left- and right-foot recordings, and the hi-hats choke each other like a real hat.
  • A 16-channel mixer with boost up to +12 dB, close, overhead and room mic levels, kick and snare boost and tighten controls, and presets (Natural Room, 2000s Emo, Post-Hardcore, Modern Metalcore).

100 grooves

The grooves cover midwest emo, emo, post-hardcore, metalcore and fills, including 5/4, 7/8, 6/8 and triplet feels. They sync to FL Studio’s tempo and show the tempo they were written for. You can preview them in time with the song or drag them straight into the piano roll.

How it’s built

The plugin is C++ with JUCE. A Python pipeline turns the raw kits (over 1,400 multi-mic files) into one stem per hit. It blends the mics with polarity correction, trims the tails, measures loudness and saves FLAC at 44.1 and 48 kHz, so a 2.5 GB kit loads in about two seconds. The grooves are written in a text-grid format and turned into MIDI by another Python script.

The hand-drawn interface is custom JUCE drawing. The kick drum has a face that winces when you hit it. The reason I did it like this is because, well, I didn’t know how to use actual assets…

Credits

Drums: CrocellKit and DRSKit by DrumGizmo (drumgizmo.org), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Screenshots

The kit: click any drum to hit it
The kit: click any drum to hit it
Groove browser with native tempo and time signature
Groove browser with native tempo and time signature
The Modern Metalcore preset
The Modern Metalcore preset

Listen

  • Emo verse · Natural kit
  • Midwest ride groove · Natural kit
  • Midwest emo in 7/8 · Natural kit
  • Post-hardcore disco beat · Natural kit
  • Metalcore gallop · Heavy kit
  • Metalcore breakdown 1 · Heavy kit
  • Metalcore breakdown 7 · Heavy kit
  • Metalcore bomb blast · Heavy kit
How this page is styled (Sketch theme)
  • This matches the plugin's marker-on-paper look: Rock Salt for the title, Permanent Marker for headings, Patrick Hand for text, the same cream paper and red.
  • Borders are drawn straight, then roughened by an SVG filter (feTurbulence into feDisplacementMap). Hover a panel and it cycles three noise seeds with steps(), so the line "boils" like hand-drawn animation.
  • Buttons have a hard offset shadow and squash when pressed.
  • Hover the header picture and it shakes like a struck drum, with an ink ring spreading from the kick. Hover a groove in the list and it highlights yellow, like the plugin's groove browser.