An original and intuitive interface, The UVI Percussion Factory has features that get those traditional rhythm ideas rolling right off the bat.
Looking for the right percussion samples can be tiring. Here’s a plugin that might save you time — and give you rhythmic flavours from across the world — the latest release from UVI, Percussion Factory.
For those who aren’t familiar, UVI is a Paris, France-based company developing synth and acoustic effect plugins, known for their “Falcon” – A hybrid synthesiser, “Sparkverb”, “Dual Delay X” and “Drum Replacer”. Everything works within the “The UVI Workstation”, their free sound bank player for your UVI plugins with integrated effects.
In Percussion Factory there’s 3 workstation display windows to toggle between — Main, Edit and FX. In the Presets, the choices of instruments are based on genre, style, timbre, construction, whether they’re shaken or played by hand, or realistic and modern sounds, as well as being regionally categorised — pretty cool!
One of my favourite presets was “World Tour” that features rhythms and instruments from Africa, The Caribbean, East Asia, India, The Middle East, and North and South America.
Main view is probably where you’ll spend most of your time, with all the usual features — save and load your own presets, solo, lock, edit or turn off each instrument. The lock feature is pretty cool as it allows you to keep your current setting while generating new sounds.
To get started click on any of the 8 instrument slots,where you can switch out a drum — or another instrument from a different preset — to create a unique percussion kit. If this wasn’t enough, you can adjust the settings of the overall tone, intensity of the groove, tap tempo capabilities, and incorporate swing to suit jazz triplets, shuffled feels and lighter grooves.
Another great feature is Decimate — it cuts beats in the rhythm to make it more or less busy, just like the step dial which controls how many divisions there are.
Diving under the hood is the Edit window, it’s an interactive mixer where you pan, EQ, adjust levels and gain, or add compression. You can also tweak individual instruments’ pitch, dynamic and frequency, and adjust the individual 1/16th, 1/8th, 1/4, 1/2, 1/1, dotted and half notes each with its own step and decimate dial.
The FX section has an extensive 11 categories of delay, reverb, modulation, filters, guitar amps, drive and distortion — including an FX send where you can adjust the reverb amount and delay. Arranged like a rack-mounted FX unit, the effects tab allows for further mixing and dialling in effects that can be dragged up or down, edited and bypassed.
The reverb section could be it’s own plugin — its got an incredible range of in-house reverbs, acoustic and hardware spaces, springs, echos and speakers, sound design spaces and special FX rooms.
There’s a Sequencer inside Percussion Factory that fine-tunes accents — all with colourful interactive sliders that drag to bring the dynamic and velocity of each beat up or down. The sequencer’s “magic wand” feature suggests accents appropriate to each instrument and how they would be traditionally played.
As well as that Percussion Factory has MIDI learning to trigger one-shot instruments, rhythms, parts and controls from your MIDI keyboard, controller, or trigger pad which can be performed and automated in real-time. The “Generate Midi” button creates a performance that you can easily drag and drop onto the track in your DAW to start layering and building ideas.
Beneath the playful kindergarten aesthetic (which I love) Percussion Factory is incredibly intuitive and boasts a swagger of authentic world instruments paired with a dynamic rhythm generator that feels human and plenty of built-in effects to keep you busy all without leaving the plugin or the house.
Once chewed through all UVI’s sounds, you can import from your own sample library — all done with a simple drag and drop.
Percussion Factory is available online for $149 USD (around $225 AUD). You can download it via the UVI Website under the products tab.
You’ll require an iLok account and an internet connection for the licence activation. System requirements are Mac OS X 10.14 to macOS 13 (64-bit) or Windows 10 to Windows 11 (64-bit) and 700 MB of disk space.
