Everyone loves an iconic drum machine. Celebrated beatboxes like the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 dominate the conversation in music tech, and appear in more famous tracks than we'd care to list. But perhaps this relentless focus on one or two machines is a little narrow-minded - after all, there's a whole world of gear out there to explore.
Our latest sample pack was put together with that adventurous vision in mind. We've collected sounds from a cornucopia of hitherto uncelebrated rhythm generators, bundling them together here for you to download, sample and experiment with.
In the pack, we've got individual hits and loops, both processed and unprocessed, from a variety of obscure drum machines, including the Boss DR-110, Yamaha DD5, Realistic Sessionmate, Korg DDM-110 and Dynacord P20.
What you need to know
This sample collection offers a variety of loops and hits in two folders, labelled by the machine used to create them.
All the samples are supplied as WAV files so can be imported directly into your DAW or sampler of choice. Because they're royalty-free, you're welcome to use the samples in your music in any way you like - all we ask is that you don't re-distribute them.
The samples are supplied in a zip file, so you'll need to extract them before you can see them. Enjoy!
Example sounds
Obscure drum machine samples: click to download
Obscure drum machine samples (217MB)
These samples originally appeared in Future Music Magazine. Check out the latest issue for many more.
Head over to the SampleRadar hub to download over 80,000 more free samples.
