UJAM Beatmaker VICE 2.4.0 for macOS

Version 2.4.0 keeps the focus on what this plug-in does best — giving you that punchy, gated-reverb, neon-lit drum sound without digging through dusty sample packs. It’s built for synthwave producers, but fits any track that needs the snap and crack of a classic 1980s drum machine processed with modern clarity.

The heart of it is ten kits, each tweaked and mixed so they sit in a track right away. There’s a Time Machine control that shifts the whole kit from tight and dry to huge and washed out — like turning a decade knob on the drum bus. MIDI drag and drop makes it easy to pull patterns into your DAW and build on them.

Part of the Beatmaker series, VICE runs in Ableton Live, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase, Studio One, Bitwig, Reaper, Reason, and Pro Tools. It’s ready for Intel and Apple silicon Macs, from Monterey through Tahoe. If you want drums that sound like a chase scene scored by a Fairlight, this is where you start.

Start with Shape and Ambience, not the kits

Out of the box, VICE leans into that bright, processed 1980s sound pretty hard. I’d suggest spending your first session with the master Shape knob and the Ambience slider rather than jumping between kits. Shape tightens or loosens the whole kit’s transient response — pull it back a notch if the snare feels too snappy for your mix. Ambience adds the room sound that makes those gated reverb snares breathe. A little goes a long way; around 10 o’clock usually sits well in a busy track.

Also worth doing early: flip through the 460 patterns with the Style selector set to the tempo of your project. The browser shows you patterns that match your DAW’s tempo, but manually scrolling with the filter set to a specific style — like “Synthpop” or “New Wave” — surfaces fills and variations you’d otherwise miss. Drag a few into your timeline even if you plan to program your own parts later. They work as quick references for how the original drum machines phrased fills.

Lock the kit while browsing patterns

A couple of conveniences sit quietly in the interface and deserve a look.

• Lock kit while browsing patterns. The little padlock icon next to the kit name keeps your current drum set when you audition different styles. Without it, loading a new pattern sometimes swaps the kit too — frustrating if you’ve already dialed in a snare you like.
• Solo a drum slot with a right-click. Right-clicking any pad isolates just that sound in the pattern preview. Great for checking whether the hi-hat groove from one style works with the kick from another.
• MIDI drag from the pattern list, not just the main view. You can drag any pattern straight from the browser panel into your DAW — no need to load it into the main sequencer first.

The resizable interface helps on smaller laptop screens. Grab the corner and shrink it down; the controls stay legible even at about 70 percent of the default size.

compared to a few alternatives

If you’ve looked at other retro drum options, the landscape splits roughly three ways. Native Instruments Battery gives you deep sample layering and routing — far more flexible if you want to design every transient from scratch. But it ships with no baked-in 1980s personality. You build the vibe yourself, which takes time VICE simply skips.

XLN Audio XO organizes samples by similarity on a visual map and leans toward modern electronic and hip-hop textures. Its 1980s drum machine content exists, but it’s scattered across expansions. VICE puts one coherent decade in a single window and adds the Time Machine control, which XO doesn’t match directly.

For pure Linn and Oberheim emulation, Aly James Lab VPROM (and the ujam torrent circles that keep older versions floating around) nails the lo-fi chip character of the originals. VICE takes a different route — it’s those machines re-recorded and polished with modern signal chains. Cleaner, wider, and ready to sit in a dense mix without extra processing. If you want dusty and unpolished, VPROM edges ahead. If you want the idea of an LM-1 through a Neve desk, VICE is the faster path.

Bottom line: a few hours exploring the lock, solo, and drag options turn VICE from a preset player into something you can steer precisely. And among its peers, it holds its ground as the most immediate way to get finished-sounding 1980s drums into a track.

• macOS 10.15 or newer
• Intel or Apple silicon Mac