VST Review - VPROM v3

This is proving a good end to my birth month so far, at least. First, I finally managed to find another rare expansion card for early 90s Roland ROMplers. More importantly, however, the gist of this post: the other night I received an email notice that version 3 of VProm, a drum machine VST created by Aly James Lab, came out, and naturally, I could hardly resist as a synthwave pioneer and early user (back when it was known as VLinn, even).

A lot of my synthwave tunes, original and otherwise, had drum sounds played via versions 1 and 2 of this product. That being said, VProm in its core is a intensive attempt to replicate the sound of the Linn LM-1 drum computer of 1980. What separates it from its competition, including GeForce’s recent IconDrum: these aren’t merely samples of the drum machine output in a sample library. This puts in the effort of working with the original sound ROM images and attempts to replicate their circuit path into the final output, imaging frequencies, noise, CEM lowpass filtering, and all. The result can get surprisingly convincing as the real deal, especially with the 16x oversampling introduced in V2.

One reason I leaned away from it for a while was because of some of its limitations, even if some were present in the Linn drum machines it attempts replicate. Fortunately, having tried out the updates in a Twitch, many of my concerns were addressed.

• It wasn’t a huge deal for the more technical users like myself, but custom EPROM sounds had to be converted into the only supported audio format, which was a now-obscure 8-bit companded format. The freeware known as Promenade is one of people’s only options for that. Now, however, while that is still an option, VPROM now has a whole set of functions dedicated to importing traditional wav files directly into the VST! Some limitations are to be kept in mind per the original EPROM format (only a maximum sample length of 65536 when created and subpar sampling rates no higher than about 27 kHz per the LM-1 output rate), but it can be fun importing your own samples to see how gritty it can sound here, especially more conveniently!

• In earlier versions of VProm, there was only room for one extra sound to be loaded in an instance, which be problematic when you consider the LM-1 didn’t have the memory for crash or ride cymbal sounds (customers in the 80s had to wait for the LinnDrum for that). It’s not a huge improvement, but version 3 introduces another extra sound slot, which results in it being possible to replicate an entire LinnDrum sans the middle tom, especially since the new extra slot is preloaded by default with a crash cymbal.

• A toggle-able CEM lowpass filter is implemented in some sounds, namely, the bass drum, tom-toms, congas, and extra sounds. In earlier versions, the extra slots were unsupported, and changing the start of the decay was the only customization allowed when enabled. In v3, there is an export mode in which you can modify not only the delay, but also the decay time (which is important for faithfulness in some sounds as the hardcoded time in v2 and earlier was arguably too short), response/slope of the filter, and also decay controls for the amplitude. All of these additions can be accessed in the CEMs menu.

Other additions include dynamic tuning (the playback pitch changes slightly with different velocities) customizable playback behavior for the hi-hat, and, while irrelevant to the sound, different UI skins for the editor, the screenshot above being one of the alternatives.

Personally, I deem this in almost every way an improvement over the VProm v2 and look forward to getting back into the use of it for my more retro-tinged themes and tunes! Hopefully this helps convince people on the fence as well! It can be purchased here, with a discount available for upgrading users: https://alyjameslab.com/alyjameslabvprom.html