Machine Attacks by HowToMakeElectronicMusic

Machine Attacks by ModeAudio is a drum hits sample library containing 238 drum samples aimed for modern electronic music. I had an opportunity to check out the samples and here's my review of it.

First of all, you won't find any acoustic style drum samples in this pack: it's purely machine, synthetic style collection of drum hits – just like the name of the sample pack implies.

The samples sound very clean, sharp and snappy. I especially liked the kick drums: it's very easy to make them poke through the mix. Very good material for any EDM where you really want the kick drum to stand out without the need of tons of EQ or compression.

The snare samples are mostly in a style of “909 snares”, but with some extra attitude, twist and variation. They fit perfectly to the genre of this pack. And works well with the kicks.

Included are also a set of hihats, claps and percussion samples and they complement the package nicely: there's closed and open hihats, blips, toms, shakers, snaps, taps, woodblocks, etc. All in a style of “machine sounds”.

Machine Attacks is available in six different formats (Logic, FL Studio, Reason Refill, WAV, Native Instruments and Ableton Live – note that each format does include the WAVs as well). The FL Studio version includes 12 DirectWave patches which are ready-to-use drum kits made out of the samples.

There's also five mixer presets. Each preset contains a nicely designed effect chain which you can use to process the drums a bit further – to add some crunch and grit for example. These are handy to drop into your drum bus mixer tracks.

So what's the verdict? Machine Attacks is a good quality and usable collection of electronic drum samples. And in my opinion, the real meat of this pack are the kick drums.

Well done, ModeAudio!

Below is a video I made to demonstrate some of the samples and content of Machine Attacks: