BRUTE Black Friday Deal 2026: $9, 92% off

The BRUTE Black Friday deal puts 92% off UJAM's Virtual Drummer for rock, grunge, punk and crossover, at $9 until Dec 9, 2026.

BRUTE is a virtual drum instrument. The maker says it fills the gap between two of its other drummers: HEAVY 2 when that is too metal, SOLID 2 when that does not rock hard enough.

What is in the BRUTE drum plugin?

• 5 genre-specific drum kits
• 6 mix presets
• 31 playing styles, each with 23 phrases, for 713 phrases in total
• Smack and Grit controls for blending the mic sets

The sound runs from grunge to nu-metal, rooted in the drumming that came out of the early-nineties Seattle scene.

How does BRUTE get its sound?

The maker designed, recorded and processed it to hold its own against layered walls of distorted guitars while keeping detail. To do that, the kit was recorded with three sets of microphones.

The Click / Smack set uses a vintage 1960s Sennheiser MD21, processed through a Manley Voxbox, and emphasises attack transients. The Grit / Dirt set uses vintage tube and ribbon overheads that pick up organic noise and resonance. The Clean / Nice set uses modern Schoeps microphones with as little colouration and distortion as possible.

The Smack knob raises the clicky mic so the hits cut through the mix. The Grit knob crossfades between the dirty and clean sets, from nice to mean.

The five kits

• DARK (The Stoner): fat, wide, lower tuning, made for slow rolls
• DIRTY (The Punk): short and punchy, for aggressive double-time
• TIGHT (The Crossover): more expression and detail, with a high-tuned piccolo snare
• NOBLE (The Radio Rocker): full-bodied, refined and punchy, for alternative anthems
• PRIME (The Mainstreamer): balanced, aimed at stadium-sized rock

Mix presets

Each mix preset swaps an entire multi-bus effect chain for every channel inside the plugin. That spares you from building the bus routing in your DAW.

• Gentle: polished, for ballads or power pop
• Slam: heavy compression, pumping garage sound
• Bite: less bass, more lower mids, aggressive
• Crush: distortion and saturation, tape and valve flavours
• Bounce: warmer and more modern, hip-hop-inspired
• Wide: stadium rock, bigger, with more subtlety and less punch

Formats and requirements

BRUTE comes as VST and AU 2. The AU 2 version works only with Logic Pro X and newer. It supports Windows 10 or later and macOS 10.14 through macOS 14, both 64-bit only.

You need 4 GB of RAM, 3.1 GB of free disk space, a 1280 x 768 display and an internet connection. The maker recommends an SSD if you move the.blob files to an external drive.